The July 1989 Clashes That Changed Abkhazia

In July 1989, a dispute over the proposed establishment of a Sukhum branch of Tbilisi State University became the focal point of a much deeper confrontation over authority, identity and Abkhazia’s political future. What appeared on the surface to be an educational disagreement reflected unresolved questions about who had the right to govern Abkhazia, protect its institutions and determine its place within a Georgia moving rapidly towards independence.

On 15–16 July, months of political tension erupted into street fighting in Sukhum and mass mobilisation across eastern Abkhazia and western Georgia. Rival crowds gathered, weapons were seized, roadblocks appeared and armed groups moved towards the capital. Soviet forces eventually intervened, preventing an even wider confrontation, but the violence left between fourteen and seventeen people dead, according to differing accounts, and hundreds injured.

The events became a decisive turning point in Georgian–Abkhazian relations. For many Abkhaz, they confirmed that their political and institutional security could not be guaranteed within an independent Georgian state governed solely from Tbilisi. Yet the violence was not inevitable, nor was it the product of timeless ethnic hatred. It developed through a specific sequence of political decisions, nationalist mobilisation, institutional coercion, fear, rumour and the collapse of trust between communities and authorities.

This article reconstructs that sequence, examines the disputed evidence and explains why the clashes of July 1989 became one of the most consequential episodes in modern Abkhaz history.

A city dividing

By late afternoon on Saturday, 15 July 1989, two concentrations of people had formed within a few streets of one another in central Sukhum. Several hundred Abkhaz had gathered around School No. 1, where an admissions commission for a proposed Sukhum branch of Tbilisi State University had established itself. Near the seafront, roughly a thousand Georgian residents and supporters had assembled in Rustaveli Park. The physical distance was short. The political distance had become immense.

The violence that followed is often described as the first fatal Georgian–Abkhaz confrontation of the late Soviet period and, with hindsight, as a prelude to the war of 1992–93. Neither label is sufficient. “Prelude” can make later war sound unavoidable; “ethnic clash” can make the causes seem primordial and obscure. What brought people into the streets was a specific chain of political decisions, protests, rumours and failures of authority.(1)

At its centre stood a university. Yet the dispute was never only about classrooms, examinations or administrative convenience. It concerned who could make binding decisions in Abkhazia, whether an institution created as part of an earlier settlement could be divided from outside, and what safeguards would remain for the Abkhaz if Georgia left the Soviet Union. By July, each procedural move was being read as a declaration about sovereignty.

Why a university branch mattered

Abkhaz State University had itself emerged from the unrest of 1978, when Abkhaz protests forced the Georgian and Soviet authorities to concede several cultural and institutional measures. The former pedagogical institute in Sukhum became the second university in the Georgian SSR. It contained Georgian-, Russian- and Abkhaz-language sectors; the Georgian sector was the largest. For Georgian students and staff, a branch administered by Tbilisi promised a direct institutional connection to the republic’s principal university and an answer to grievances they described as discrimination.(3)

For many Abkhaz, the same proposal meant something very different. The university was one of the few substantial gains secured after decades in which Abkhaz schools had been closed, the language had been forced into a Georgian-based script, publishing and broadcasting had been curtailed, and state-directed settlement had sharply changed the demographic balance. In the 1989 census, people classified as Georgian numbered 239,872, or 45.7 per cent of Abkhazia’s population; Abkhaz numbered 93,267, or 17.8 per cent. Those figures did not prove a conspiracy in 1989. They did explain why control over an educational institution could not be separated from memories of linguistic suppression and demographic vulnerability.(2,3)

The proposed branch would remove the Georgian sector from Abkhaz State University and place it under direct administration from Tbilisi rather than the autonomous republic’s educational authorities. George Hewitt argues that this would weaken the viability of an institution that Abkhaz society had fought to obtain. He also notes that the existing university drew students from western Georgia, some of whom remained in Abkhazia. Whether every fear attached to the new branch was justified is less important than recognising that the fear had a concrete historical basis.(2)

There was also a legal question. On 14 May, the Georgian SSR’s Council of Ministers authorised the branch after weeks of strikes by Georgian students, staff and allied organisations. Yet the documentary collection compiled by B. E. Sagaria records that Union-level approval was required under a 1982 USSR Council of Ministers regulation. The USSR State Education Committee declined to endorse the proposal. A commission of Soviet people’s deputies, accompanied by a senior Union education official, visited Abkhazia from 3 to 10 July and concluded that the May measure should be treated as temporary, had outlived its purpose and was disrupting both education and inter-communal relations. Final authority, it said, belonged at Union level.(4,7)

G. Barklaya, commander of the Abkhaz ASSR Ministry of Internal Affairs operational group, with local residents.

1989: two national projects, one territory

The university dispute acquired its force from the political sequence that preceded it. On 18 March 1989, a large gathering at Lykhny appealed to the Soviet leadership to restore the republican status Abkhazia had held in the early 1920s. The appeal was signed first by Boris Adleiba, then first secretary of the Abkhaz regional party committee, and by other officials; Hewitt records that signatories also included representatives of communities other than the Abkhaz. The crowd is commonly estimated at about 30,000, and the petition eventually carried more than 30,000 signatures.(5)

The response from Georgian nationalist organisations was immediate and punitive. Demonstrations denounced the appeal as anti-Georgian and demanded action against its signatories. Merab Kostava described them as traitors to a united Georgia and warned that they would be punished. Georgian students at Abkhaz State University began a sit-in and called for the dismissal of the rector, Aleko Gvaramia, and sanctions against university employees who had signed the Lykhny appeal. Adleiba was removed from office on 6 April.(5)

The Tbilisi demonstrations that culminated in the tragedy of 9 April began partly around the “Abkhaz question”, including demands to abolish autonomous formations, before concentrating on Georgian independence. Soviet troops violently dispersed the crowd, killing twenty people. For Georgian society, 9 April became proof that continued Soviet rule was intolerable. For many Abkhaz, however, the independence movement was simultaneously advancing a majoritarian programme in which their own demand for self-determination was treated as treason.(5)

That asymmetry became the central constitutional problem. Georgian leaders claimed the right to withdraw their republic from the USSR, while insisting that Abkhazia had no comparable right to reconsider its relationship with Georgia. Autonomy was increasingly portrayed as an artificial Soviet device; the Georgian state, by contrast, was treated as historically indivisible. The issue was not that Georgian independence lacked legitimacy. It was that no mutually accepted mechanism existed to determine what independence would mean for the peoples and autonomies within the Georgian SSR.

Soviet Interior Ministry troops man a checkpoint following the introduction of a special security regime across Abkhazia during the Georgian–Abkhazian crisis.

The commission’s warning, and the road to confrontation

By the middle of May, the Georgian-sector strike had expanded beyond the university. Teachers, pupils, cultural institutions and workers joined demonstrations. Vitaly Sharia’s retrospective account says that the decision to establish the branch was announced late on 14 May before a crowd of about 5,000, ending the strike. The next evening, Abkhaz protesters filled Lenin Square. Officials tried to calm them by describing the branch as temporary, but advertisements for admissions soon appeared in the Tbilisi press.(6)

On 22 June, Abkhaz protesters began a continuous sit-in at the state philharmonic, demanding intervention from the USSR Supreme Soviet. They dispersed only when the Union commission arrived on 3 July. Its findings were published on 12 July in the Abkhaz- and Russian-language republican press. The Georgian-language newspaper Sabch’ota Abkhazeti intended to print the report with a Tbilisi State University commentary arguing that the commission had no legal force and that admissions would continue. Around 400 Abkhaz blocked the printing house on 13 and 14 July to prevent publication.(6,7)

Other actions deepened the sense of provocation. Hewitt records that Abkhaz activists destroyed a temporary Sukhum memorial to those killed in Tbilisi on 9 April, an act he explicitly describes as regrettable. The school building selected for the branch was surrounded, and access by applicants was threatened. On the evening of 14 July, several hundred Abkhaz reportedly blockaded the courtyard of School No. 1 and demanded that the admissions commission leave.(8)

These actions cannot be dismissed as passive defence. Blocking a newspaper, destroying a memorial and surrounding an educational building were coercive. They also gave Georgian activists powerful evidence for a narrative in which Georgian residents were being denied their rights by Abkhaz nationalists. At the same time, Tbilisi’s determination to proceed after the Union commission’s intervention confirmed the opposite narrative: that legal competence, local consent and the survival of Abkhaz State University could all be overridden when they conflicted with Georgian political priorities.

The attached sources disagree over the precise date fixed for entrance examinations. Dates of 16, 17 and 20 July appear in retrospective accounts, press notices and official documents. The discrepancy should not be concealed. What is clear is that admissions were moving forward in mid-July and that both communities understood the next few days as decisive.

15 July: what can be established

The exact first spark remains disputed. Sharia offers the most detailed reconstruction: at about 5 p.m., a young Abkhaz artist and a companion approached the Georgian gathering in Rustaveli Park to take photographs and were beaten. A music teacher alerted those around the school, who rushed towards the park with sticks, stones and pieces of fencing. Sharia knew the artist and regarded the incident as spontaneous, but this remains a retrospective account rather than independently corroborated fact.(10)

A later recollection by Koba Chitanaa begins after Abkhaz men had already advanced from the philharmonic area carrying sticks. His testimony is openly partisan and contains crowd estimates that cannot be verified. It nonetheless confirms the speed with which the encounter became organised street violence. Georgian participants were driven towards the shore; some entered buildings or the sea. Sharia records that early fatalities included the Georgian activist Vova Vekua. A group of Abkhaz then broke through a police cordon, entered School No. 1 and beat members of the admissions commission.(9,10)

Fighting spread through the centre. Abkhaz gathered in Lenin Square, including many women. At about 9.30 p.m., according to Sharia and an Abkhaz Interior Ministry account he cites, a large Georgian group advanced from the direction of Chavchavadze Street, some stripped to the waist so that participants could recognise one another. Two KamAZ lorries moved at the front. An explosive device damaged one vehicle and dispersed the formation. Firearms then appeared, and shooting continued through the night.(10)

This sequence does not support a simple story of an unarmed community attacked by a uniformly organised enemy. Abkhaz activists had imposed blockades and used violence against the admissions commission; Abkhaz participants also used an explosive device. Georgian groups gathered in large numbers, advanced in formation and were armed at least by the later stages. Law-enforcement bodies, themselves ethnically mixed, were overwhelmed and unable to impose a common account of events.

Chitanaa’s recollection also shows how quickly identity became a matter of life and death, and how individual conduct still cut across collective fear. He took a badly injured Abkhaz friend into a hospital treating many wounded Georgians. A Georgian doctor concealed their identity and arranged a transfer to the republican hospital. Later, a Georgian former classmate and his brothers tried to help Chitanaa pass through roadblocks. Such episodes do not cancel the violence. They demonstrate that the communities were not unitary actors, even at the point of greatest danger.(9)

Officers of the Abkhaz ASSR Ministry of Internal Affairs in a village during the inter-ethnic unrest in Abkhazia.

Rumour, weapons and mobilisation east of Sukhum

News travelled faster than verified information. In Georgian neighbourhoods of Sukhum, families hid children and improvised barricades; Abkhaz neighbourhoods and villages did the same. In mixed settlements such as Tamysh, roadblocks separated communities that had lived beside one another. Fear was reciprocal, but the political consequences of rumour depended on who could mobilise men, vehicles and weapons.

A contemporaneous chronology prepared by the Gal district prosecutor records how the crisis spread. At about 10 p.m. on 15 July, an actor arriving from Sukhum told people in Gal that armed Abkhaz were attacking unarmed Georgians and that there were dead and wounded. Within two hours, the document says, roughly 7,000 people had gathered. District first secretary Vakhtang Kolbaia urged them not to travel to Sukhum. Passing vehicles brought further reports that Georgians were being killed.(11)

The return of a body from the Aaldzga crossing intensified the crowd’s anger. The prosecutor’s chronology then records attacks on guards at hydroelectric facilities, the seizure of carbines and Nagant revolvers, an assault on an explosives depot, the removal of ammunition from a hunting shop and repeated attempts to obtain weapons from the district police. An order to issue twenty hunting guns ended, according to the document, with about 1,200 guns being taken. It also reports that armed men arrived from western Georgia and Svaneti, urging resistance to an alleged impending Abkhaz attack on Gal.(11)

The document was produced by a Soviet prosecutorial institution in a highly politicised crisis. It is evidence of what officials recorded, not a neutral transcript of every event. Yet its specificity makes one conclusion difficult to avoid: by 16 July, mobilisation in and around Gal had ceased to be an unarmed movement of relatives seeking news. Weapons were being seized, outside participants were arriving, and rumours of extermination were turning a local confrontation into a regional march.

Hewitt adds the more serious claim that the gates of the prison in Zugdidi were opened and inmates were armed and directed towards Abkhazia. No independent confirmation of that allegation appears in the attached source pack. It should therefore remain an attributed report, not an established fact.(12)

The Aaldzga line

The road from Gal and western Georgia towards Sukhum passed through Ochamchira and across the Aaldzga River. Kolbaia alerted Sergei Bagapsh, then first secretary in Ochamchira district, that large numbers were crossing the Ingur into Abkhazia. Local officials and residents hurriedly organised a barrier at the Aaldzga crossing. Sharia describes dozens of vehicles blocking the bridge; Hewitt says a tanker was detonated there to make passage impossible.(13)

Crowd estimates vary sharply. Sharia writes that as many as 30,000 people had gathered by morning, while the Gal chronology moves from 7,000 at midnight to “several tens of thousands” later on 16 July. Such figures were produced amid panic and should be treated cautiously. The safer conclusion is that thousands of people, some armed, were concentrated east of the crossing and intended to continue towards Sukhum.

The barrier was not ethnically pure. Sharia records that some local Georgians from Ochamchira joined the defence of the right bank because they understood what a breakthrough could mean for the mixed town and the road beyond it. This matters. Bagapsh’s line was not simply an Abkhaz front against all Georgians; it was an improvised attempt to prevent a much larger armed confrontation.

There had already been shooting and deaths around the crossing, and each death generated new stories of deliberate attack. Sharia reports that an airborne detachment under Colonel-General Shatalin arrived from Sukhum airport in the early afternoon of 16 July, after which the mass trying to advance withdrew. Hewitt places the larger arrival of Soviet Interior Ministry troops on 17 July. The two accounts can be reconciled as separate stages: a limited military intervention at the bridge, followed by a wider deployment across Sukhum, Ochamchira and mixed communities.(13)

Intervention and an uneasy halt

The Abkhaz Presidium’s emergency resolution of 16 July recorded an interim toll of six dead, twelve in a grave condition and 178 people seeking medical treatment, of whom 105 had been admitted to hospital. It asked the USSR authorities to impose emergency measures in Sukhum, Ochamchira and Gulripsh district. On 17 July, the USSR Supreme Soviet ordered the Georgian and Abkhaz governments and the Soviet Interior Ministry to restore order, protect the population and reopen the Transcaucasian railway. A special regime restricting movement and requiring the surrender of weapons took effect across Abkhazia from the night of 18 July.(14)

Soviet Interior Ministry conscripts and military cadets patrolled towns, villages and roadblocks. Hewitt, who was in Abkhazia during the crisis, recalls that residents from both communities welcomed the young conscripts and brought them food and drink. Their presence did not solve the political conflict. It did create a physical space between armed groups at a moment when local institutions could no longer do so.(15)

Published accounts differ over the final toll. Sharia gives fourteen dead, nine Georgians and five Abkhaz, and about 140 wounded. Later Abkhaz institutional documents refer to sixteen deaths. Hewitt gives seventeen dead, identifying eleven Kartvelians, five Abkhaz and one Greek, with 424 injured. The Sputnik account gives seventeen dead and 448 injured. These totals may reflect provisional reporting, later deaths from wounds, different geographical or temporal boundaries, and inconsistent definitions of “injured” and “treated”. No secure basis exists for collapsing them into one synthetic number.(16)

What is not seriously disputed is that the toll could have been far higher. Armed mobilisation had extended from central Sukhum to Gal and the Aaldzga; large crowds faced one another; police stores and other facilities had lost weapons. Rapid intervention by Union forces prevented those concentrations from merging into a wider battle.

Soviet Interior Ministry troops patrol the streets of Sukhum during the Georgian–Abkhazian crisis.

The political aftershock

The shooting stopped before the political conflict did. Transport and ordinary life took weeks to recover. Sharia recalls mothers in both Abkhaz and Georgian families telling children to say they were Russian if challenged on the way to school. People lost jobs on ethnic grounds. In villages and neighbourhoods, the roadblocks left behind a new mental map: places that had once been shared were now approached as territories controlled by one community or the other.(18)

The university branch survived the crisis and was eventually established. For Abkhaz society, that outcome reinforced the belief that bloodshed had not altered Tbilisi’s underlying decision. Abkhaz officials later challenged the impartiality of the Georgian prosecutorial investigation and asked for the cases to be transferred to Union jurisdiction. Georgian narratives, meanwhile, concentrated on Abkhaz attacks, the obstruction of Georgian education and the death of Georgian activists.(18)

Public rhetoric hardened. Hewitt reproduces Georgian press attacks on members of the Union commission and articles that portrayed the Abkhaz and other minorities as rootless intruders without a legitimate history on the land. Such language did not represent every Georgian. It did, however, circulate at a moment when the Georgian national movement was gaining authority and when Abkhaz confidence in republican institutions was collapsing.(17)

The events also exposed the weakness of the Soviet federal system. Moscow could send troops and identify the competent authority for opening a university branch, but it had no credible political process for reconciling Georgia’s demand for independence with Abkhazia’s demand for restored status and security. Tbilisi insisted on hierarchy; Sukhum appealed over Tbilisi’s head to Moscow. Each move deepened the other side’s conviction that compromise meant surrender.

A watershed, not an inevitable war

For many Georgians, 9 April 1989 had made independence morally non-negotiable. For many Abkhaz, 15–16 July had an equivalent effect on the question of remaining within an independent Georgian state. The lesson drawn in Abkhazia was not merely that street violence was possible. It was that a dispute over a core institution could be decided outside Abkhaz authority, defended through mass mobilisation, and followed by armed movement from beyond Abkhazia’s eastern boundary.

That conclusion explains why July became a psychological watershed. It does not prove that the war of 1992–93 was inevitable. The same source record contains evidence of choices that prevented escalation: Kolbaia urged crowds not to travel; local Georgians joined the Aaldzga barrier; doctors and neighbours protected people from the other community; Soviet forces were accepted by residents who wanted separation from armed groups rather than victory over their neighbours. Political agency had not disappeared.

What failed was the constitutional framework. Georgian independence was advanced as an exercise in national self-determination, while Abkhaz claims to security, equality and a different state relationship were excluded from the same principle. Abkhaz resistance, in turn, increasingly relied on Moscow as the only authority able to restrain Tbilisi, a dependence that Georgian society interpreted as collaboration with imperial power. There was no institution trusted by both.

The clashes of July 1989 therefore matter less as a rehearsal for a predetermined war than as a warning that went unanswered. They revealed how quickly administrative unilateralism, demographic fear, nationalist rhetoric and rumour could convert a constitutional dispute into armed mobilisation. They also revealed what any durable settlement would have required: consent rather than hierarchy, enforceable safeguards rather than assurances, and recognition that neither people’s security could be built by denying the other’s political existence.

+ Soviet Abkhazia 1989 Facts and Thoughts, by Viktor Popkov

+ The murder of Alexei Kogoniya by Georgian Nationalists on 16 July 1989

+ Unity in the name of freedom: for the anniversary of the 1989 Lykhny appeal

+ An Open Letter to the Georgian People (1989), by George Hewitt

Why the casualty figures differ

The sources do not give a single final total. Vitaly Sharia cites fourteen deaths, nine Georgians and five Abkhaz, and about 140 wounded. A later Abkhaz institutional appeal refers to sixteen deaths. George Hewitt gives seventeen deaths, eleven Kartvelians, five Abkhaz and one Greek, and 424 injured, while Ainar Chitanava’s Sputnik article gives seventeen dead and 448 injured. A 16 July emergency resolution was necessarily provisional: it recorded six deaths, twelve people in a grave condition and 178 seeking medical care. The differences may reflect later deaths from wounds, whether figures cover Sukhum alone or the wider crisis through Gal and Ochamchira, and whether “injured” includes everyone treated. The responsible formulation is therefore that published accounts place the final death toll between fourteen and seventeen, with injury totals varying far more widely.

Endnotes

1. George Hewitt, Discordant Neighbours: A Reassessment of the Georgian–Abkhazian and Georgian–South Ossetian Conflicts (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013), pp. 74–77; Vitaly Sharia, “15–16 July 1989 in Abkhazia: How It Happened”, Echo of the Caucasus, 16 July 2019.
2. Hewitt, Discordant Neighbours, pp. 48–50 and p. 11. The 1989 census table gives a total population of 525,061, including 239,872 people classified as Georgian and 93,267 Abkhaz.
3. Hewitt, Discordant Neighbours, pp. 42–49, on the Stalin–Beria period, the closure of Abkhaz-language schools, demographic change and the creation of Abkhaz State University in 1978.
4. Hewitt, Discordant Neighbours, p. 75; Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Abkhaz ASSR, Resolution No. 1294-XI, 15 July 1989, reproduced in B. E. Sagaria (comp.), An Important Milestone in the History of Abkhazia (Sukhum, 2002).
5. Hewitt, Discordant Neighbours, pp. 61–66. Hewitt reproduces contemporary Georgian press reports and speeches concerning Lykhny, the Tbilisi demonstrations and the university strikes.
6. Sharia, “15–16 July 1989 in Abkhazia”; Hewitt, Discordant Neighbours, pp. 74–76.
7. Resolution No. 1294-XI, 15 July 1989, in Sagaria. The reproduced document cites USSR Council of Ministers Resolution No. 816 of 2 September 1982 and summarises the Union commission’s conclusion.
8. Hewitt, Discordant Neighbours, p. 76; Sharia, “15–16 July 1989 in Abkhazia”.
9. Ainar Chitanava, “First Blood: The July Events of 1989 Through an Eyewitness’s Eyes”, Sputnik Abkhazia, 16 July 2019, based on the later recollections of Koba Chitanaa. The testimony is used here as attributed memory, not as an independent master chronology.
10. Sharia, “15–16 July 1989 in Abkhazia”.
11. D. M. Gvagvalia, Gal district prosecutor, “Chronicle of Events That Took Place on 15–17 July 1989 in Gal District”, reproduced in Sagaria, An Important Milestone in the History of Abkhazia.
12. Hewitt, Discordant Neighbours, p. 76. The claim concerning prisoners released from Zugdidi gaol is not independently corroborated in the attached sources.
13. Sharia, “15–16 July 1989 in Abkhazia”; Hewitt, Discordant Neighbours, pp. 76–77.
14. Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Abkhaz ASSR, Resolution No. 1295-XI, 16 July 1989; USSR Supreme Soviet Resolution No. 238-I, 17 July 1989; and the Abkhaz ASSR resolution establishing a special regime from 18 July, all reproduced in Sagaria.
15. Hewitt, Discordant Neighbours, p. 77.
16. Sharia gives fourteen dead and about 140 wounded; a later institutional document in Sagaria gives sixteen dead; Hewitt, p. 77, gives seventeen dead and 424 injured; Chitanava gives seventeen dead and 448 injured.
17. Hewitt, Discordant Neighbours, pp. 77–81, on the political and press reaction after the deaths.
18. Sharia, “15–16 July 1989 in Abkhazia”, on the prolonged social aftermath, separate roadblocks and the eventual establishment of the Tbilisi State University branch.

Sources and further reading

Primary and documentary material

• Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Abkhaz ASSR, Resolution No. 1294-XI, 15 July 1989.
• Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Abkhaz ASSR, Resolution No. 1295-XI, 16 July 1989.
• USSR Supreme Soviet, Resolution No. 238-I, 17 July 1989.
• D. M. Gvagvalia, “Chronicle of Events That Took Place on 15–17 July 1989 in Gal District”.
• The above documents are reproduced in B. E. Sagaria (comp.), An Important Milestone in the History of Abkhazia: The Tenth Session of the Supreme Soviet of the Eleventh Convocation and the Adoption of the Declaration of Sovereignty of Abkhazia on 25 August 1990 (Sukhum, 2002).

Eyewitness and retrospective accounts

• Ainar Chitanava, “First Blood: The July Events of 1989 Through an Eyewitness’s Eyes”, Sputnik Abkhazia, 16 July 2019. Based on Koba Chitanaa’s recollections.
• Vitaly Sharia, “15–16 July 1989 in Abkhazia: How It Happened”, Echo of the Caucasus, 16 July 2019. Retrospective journalistic reconstruction incorporating personal observation and later testimony.

Secondary analysis

• George Hewitt, Discordant Neighbours: A Reassessment of the Georgian–Abkhazian and Georgian–South Ossetian Conflicts (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013), especially pp. 42–50 and 61–81.