L’État malgré eux. Trajectoires d’anciens combattants géorgiens d’Abkhazie et fabrique de l’État

This article uses the war in Abkhazia (1992-1993) to examine the interactions between the lives of combatants, the collapse of the Soviet state and state-building. It is based on a corpus of interviews conducted with Georgian ex-combatants in 2016 and 2018 about their life before, during and after the conflict. By taking up arms, did they contribute to building the post-Soviet Georgia state or, on the contrary, to an atomization of forces that hindered this process? Why did these ex-combatants play a minimal role in the transformation of the Georgian state? And why did the war experience not spare these interviewees the downward social and economic mobility that affected all Georgians? If the war had structuring effects in the medium term, it was without these combatants. Besides contributing to the debate about the relations between war and state trajectories, this article calls for research using a bottom-up approach to the history of the construction of post-Soviet institutions.