From Intractability to Appeasement. A Federal perspective for the Abkhaz-Georgian Conflict

At the beginning of the 21st century the problem of the development of the regional security becomes increasingly actual in nowadays international politics. It especially concerns the Post-soviet space, which remains in the most difficult process of transformation in the present days. The Georgian-Abkhaz conflict which has entered a sharp phase in 1992 is one of the first and most long (from 1992 to 2008) international conflicts in the former Soviet Union. Complex factors such as the deep roots of the confrontation, the great human sacrifices of the parties during the hostilities, the high degree of involvement of the entire population of Abkhazia in the process of defending its interests and the asymmetry in the approaches of the parties, determine the need for an analysis of the nature and the origins of the Georgian-Abkhazian conflict in its dynamics. The work therefore trys to identify the nature and the origins of the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict, the causes of inefficiency of the official negotiation process and evaluates the hypothesis of a possible federalist transformation of the institutions of both the entities considered. In the international panorama, federalism, in fact, is being increasingly considered as an instument of conflict tranformation in the case of conflicts based on cultural diversity and ethnicity.