Anastasia Shesterinina’s Mobilizing in Uncertainty: Collective Identities and War in Abkhazia masterfully achieves three objectives. First, it enhances scholarly understanding of mobilization in civil war, highlighting how the “collective threat framing” that happens through individuals’ social networks can shape their wartime mobilization. Second, it represents a model for fieldwork-based research in our discipline, giving voice to ordinary people who had to make hard choices at times of intense uncertainty. Third, it presents an in-depth analysis of an important yet understudied case, introducing the reader to the 1992–93 Georgian-Abkhaz war, which to this day has local, regional, and international implications.

The puzzle motivating the book is how ordinary people navigate the uncertainty they face at the onset of a civil war to make decisions about mobilizing. Departing from the oft-held assumption that people make cost-benefit calculations based on a known sense of risk, Shesterinina shows how the situation faced by the Abkhaz was instead characterized by intense uncertainty: “Was this a war… Who was threatened by whom, and to what extent?… How to act in response? … for whom to mobilize” (pp. 11–12; emphasis in original). This puzzle emerged from the many conversations that Shesterinina had during her fieldwork, demonstrating her genuine engagement with research participants from the very first stage of formulating the research question. The book draws on participant observation and 150 in-depth, semistructured interviews conducted in Abkhazia in 2011. This unique and rich ethnographic material also challenged the theoretical expectations that Shesterinina had when entering the field—namely, that prior activism would be a key predictor for mobilization—and steered her toward developing a novel argument emphasizing collective conflict identities and collective threat framing.

The book reveals that, although political elites articulated the imminent threat that the Georgian advance in August 1992 represented for Abkhazia, key to mobilization was how this message was adapted to fit local needs through the networks of friends and family members that people turned to at such a time of uncertainty. “The discussions that unfolded in this trust-based context consolidated the threads of information that individuals had into shared interpretations of threat and collective mobilization decisions” (p. 145). These decisions then defined who should be protected from whom and were on a spectrum from self-regarding (aimed at protecting one’s own safety) to other-regarding (aimed at protecting the wider group), with protection of family, friends, and local community in between. Based on interactions within their everyday networks, people made decisions about whether to flee, hide, defect, or instead to fight or otherwise support the war effort—and, if they chose the last option, whether to do so locally or in areas of intense fighting.

Whereas those who came to perceive that the Georgian military advance required defending the Abkhaz as a group might mobilize and join the struggle in areas of intense fighting, those who came to perceive the threat to be more local might instead mobilize to defend local families or to help them flee or hide. For example, the book describes the decision-making process of a woman who was able and willing to fight but, through discussions with family members, decided to flee with her children instead because she perceived the threat to be local: “[When the war began], my mother said, ‘You just try to return! [as a blessing to join the war effort].’ I did not want to [leave], but was persuaded… to take the children away from the village [where it was dangerous]. We went to Moscow… by boat” (p. 149). Through such evidence, the book convincingly demonstrates that mobilization depended on how the threat was framed and adapted to the local context through the social networks in which people were embedded.

Although there are long-standing literatures emphasizing the importance of both framing and social networks for mobilization, what is new in Mobilizing in Uncertainty is the role that everyday networks play in filtering information and fostering shared understandings that, in turn, shape decisions not only about whether to mobilize, but also how, where, and for whom. Although these decisions may well be about risk reduction, Shesterinina shows that, in a setting of intense uncertainty, we cannot assume that people make cost-benefit calculations based on a known sense of risk. As such, the book speaks to wider debates on rational decision making in political science and international relations (and beyond).

The central contention of the book is that a theory of mobilization needs to place “individuals in the context of history of intergroup conflict and social networks that relate people to one another as part of their group” (p. 205). This has methodological implications, requiring a research design that puts locals front and center and gives voice to ordinary people. Indeed, Shesterinina writes, “Taking seriously how Abkhaz men and women spoke about the war shaped the analysis” (p. 40). The book expertly does so, relying on months of fieldwork. Chapter 1, “Studying Civil War Mobilization,” a useful guide for any researcher considering fieldwork, provides a detailed account of the research process, including the selection of research sites, research participants, and interview questions (including a sample interview excerpt); data triangulation; and potential challenges related to memory recall and bias. It also provides valuable reflections on Shesterinina’s role as a researcher in the field. She notes, “My day was structured around interviews, carried out in the offices of local town halls, respondents’ homes, and public areas, including parks and cafés, and archival work.… To many potential interviewees, this routine meant that I was indeed a researcher with whom they could share sensitive, often appalling, personal stories of violence and war” (p. 30). Indeed, it is worth recognizing the large data requirements for this kind of immersive fieldwork, which requires lengthy time in the field, negotiation of access, and language skills, as well as a careful attention to research ethics.

The book is a model for theory development, relying on ethnographic research from a little-explored empirical case to develop new questions and theoretical insights. As a political scientist and as a student of post-Soviet politics, I very much appreciate the book’s contribution. The richness of the empirical material provides one-of-a-kind insights into the mobilization in Abkhazia in 1992–93, which primarily took place locally. The book paints a powerful picture of how, as soon as people learned of the Georgian advance on August 14, 1992, they gathered in their villages’ or towns’ central square or churches, trying to make sense of what to do: “The confusion and panic set off by the advance of Georgian forces was vividly manifested as crowds assembled locally. Men and women debated what happened, whether a war indeed began” (p. 138).

Although Mobilizing in Uncertainty is a book about Abkhazia at the onset of the Georgian-Abkhaz war in 1992–93, the lessons travel well beyond this case; indeed, the conclusion briefly discusses the Rwandan civil war and ongoing uprising in Syria. When considering how the argument may travel both across space and over time, several questions stand out. First, is it something particular about Abkhaz society that made quotidian networks—and the opinions of the people in those networks—so important for people? As Shesterinina notes, “The logic of mobilization by the Abkhaz cannot be grasped without the preceding record of collective action that made local assembly a key setting for the ordinary Abkhaz to turn to” (p. 141). Second—and speaking to the growing research agenda on online mobilization—to what extent do the virtual quotidian networks that many people now have shape the interactions and consequent decisions described in this book? If individuals’ quotidian networks are larger by virtue of existing online, does that shape how threats are framed and consequent self-regarding or other-regarding actions? Mobilizing in Uncertainty is certainly a book that leaves the reader inspired, and scholarship on civil war and social movements would be well served if it encouraged future research exploring these questions.