ABSTRACT
This chapter takes a close look at the dynamics of a single civil war to help reader better understand whether a “comprehensive partition” – a partition that separates territories, militaries, and peoples – can bring peace to an ongoing ethnosectarian civil war. This is an empirical test of the arguments put forth by many scholars and policy-makers who have prescribed partition to address civil wars in countries as diverse as Bosnia, Iraq, Syria, and Papua New Guinea. The chapter focuses exclusively on regions within Abkhazia, instead of the whole of Georgia, as the violence of this civil war did not occur outside of Abkhazia’s internal territorial boundaries. It has shown the importance of comprehensive partition being accompanied by a war termination that may occur for reasons entirely unrelated to ethnic group demographics.
