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Bok review: Boundaries of Displacement: Belonging and Return among Forcibly Displaced Young Georgians from AbkhaziaMinna Lundgren Östersund: Mittuniversitetet 2016, 168 sider. ISBN 9789188025807

This article connects a specific generational experience of having been dispossessed of former social status and political influence to suspicious theories of conspiracies and hidden connections. Th rough ethnographic cases from Georgia I argue that while acting as an explanatory framework for the personal experience of being economically and politically dispossessed, conspiracy theorizing may also work as an everyday means of reappropriating a morally meaningful social identity through the mirroring of a general form of political rhetoric and power. The theories analyzed in the article draw on socially and culturally recognizable registers and tap into a general atmosphere of suspicion and opacity in which mistrust of official accounts and rhetoric is reasonable and appealing. They thus work as a means of repacking generational and economical marginality into a broader framework that is of concern to the wider community and may be seen to represent an effort of reclaiming a moral high ground and being reinscribed into wider social and national domains.

The chapter explores the formative relationship between perceptions of macro-politics and everyday micro-politics in the Republic of Georgia. “Politics” in the Georgian context, I suggest, may be understood as a grey zone that is simultaneously, in emic terms, considered highly uncertain, immoral, and external to ordinary life and yet, analytically speaking, formative of everyday concerns and micro-political interactions. I discuss different aspects of perceptions of politics as opaque and inaccessible and the consequences this bear for people’s engagement and disengagement with their socio-political surroundings. I argue that due to a profound lack of trust in public institutions and political personae everyday social and economic security is pursued ‘invisibly’ through personal networks, connections and informal transactions. ‘Invisibly’, in the sense that these connections are often known only to the people involved – at least as characterized by the perceived outsider. Finally, I propose that everyday responses to political opacity and uncertainty, in the end, contribute to their reproduction in perception and experience. That is, the idea of public macro-politics as being opaque and uncertain, and the ways in which citizens appropriate and act towards this idea, in the end, produces and reproduces political practice as such. Micro-politics – maintaining and relying on informal networks and connections – is simultaneously a response to an uncertain macro-political reality and the continuing production and confirmation of this reality across socio-political scale.