Shaping Abkhazia: Cartographic Anxieties and the Making and Remaking of the Abkhazian Geobody

Abstract

This paper explores Abkhazia's quest for a national state by examining ‘national maps’, which do not depict the typical physical and political features that maps normally portray. The recent proliferation of Abkhazian national maps reveals the attention given to Abkhazia's ‘shape’. In order to legitimize the national map, Abkhazia must claim control over the entire territory within Abkhazia's borders. Attempts at the nationalization of all Abkhazian space have encountered difficulties in two problematic regions, the Gal/i district and Kodor/i Gorge. I will illustrate how borderland regions are negotiated, made part of a nationalist discourse and are territorialized within a nationalist project.