Charles Taylor Book Award Winner 2022: Anastasia Shesterinina, for Mobilizing in Uncertainty: Collective Identities and War in Abkhazia

Winner: Anastasia Shesterinina (The University of Sheffield) for Mobilizing in Uncertainty: Collective Identities and War in Abkhazia (Cornell University Press)

Mobilizing in Uncertainty is a model of clear and impactful interpretive social science. It leads the reader into the anguished processes by which ordinary citizens decide whether to take up arms, take sides, hide or flee a coming war, through a sociohistorical study of mobilization during the Georgian-Abkhaz War of 1992-1993. Based on immersive fieldwork in Abkhazia, Georgia, and Russia, Shesterinina identifies strikingly divergent trajectories of mobilization among Abkhaz people during the war’s onset, and argues that actors decided differently based on “collective conflict identities,” forged through shared histories and social networks, which in turn shaped how they interpreted the meaning of the conflict, and their role within it. What makes Mobilizing in Uncertainty especially laudable is its theoretical boldness and methodological creativity. It exemplifies the power of embracing ethnographic surprises and generative insights from accidental ethnography, following in the steps of Lorraine Bayard de Volo and Lee Ann Fujii. Shesterinina directly challenges an influential assumption in studies of civil war and conflict about the rationality of individuals who know and assess the risks of mobilization. She gives reason for scholars to take seriously the peculiar and profoundly disorienting nature of uncertainty that colors people’s lives at the early onset of conflict, informed by an extraordinary set of interviews she conducted with Abkhaz men and women reflecting upon the first four days of Georgian invasion. And by situating their choices in historical, relational context, Mobilizing in Uncertainty admirably scales up from a micro-level inquiry of intimate, familial, and communal interactions to macro-dynamics of wartime resistance, solidarity and large perennial questions concerning the logic and consequences of conflict and violence. This ambitious and innovative book showcases the best aspects of interpretive field research.

Selection Committee:

Diana S. Kim (Georgetown University)

Jinee Lokaneeta (Drew University)

Robert Nichols (University of Minnesota)