Promoting IDPs' and Women's Voices in Post-Conflict Georgia

outlook about the future, promoting IDP passivity and ultimately discouraging integration andparticipation. 315Elderly IDPs especially suffer from this uncertainty. As they have shorter life spans after experiencingsuch significant losses in the middle of their lives, older IDPs “don’t have time to adapt again.” 316 Thesepeople were “preparing themselves for a different life, then it turned out completely different.” 317 Withless access to avenues of integration, such as education and employment, compared to youngergenerations, older IDPs have had a more difficult experience adapting to life in displacement, therebylimiting their engagement in public life.Overall, past loss and current economic instability and uncertainty results in IDPs’ living “very much insurvival mode.” 318 Many live day-to-day, struggling to maintain a livelihood and feed their families. Thislifestyle directly impacts their opportunities to participate:“They don’t have time, energy, and motivation, to network with others, to engage inprotests…They are very passive, they became very passive being dependent onsomeone else (government, NGOs, etc). It’s very hard for them to self-mobilize and tryto pursue their own agenda.” 319Many IDPs experience this passivity in their own lives regarding their integration process, forestalled asthey wait to return. This lack of engagement translates into low participation in local communities andespecially national politics. A vicious cycle arises, as IDPs’ challenging living conditions may result inthem becoming demoralized and less motivated to integrate. The lack of integration may reinforce itself.For some IDPs, the longer they remain in dilapidated collective centers, a symbol of their difficult life indisplacement, the harder it is to arise out of these conditions. This passivity in turn directly countersefforts to engage in public life.For IDPs from the first wave, two decades of poverty and neglect have weakened their decision-makingagencies within the broader Georgian society.It is important to distinguish IDPs’ passivity fromdependency, and to recognize the role of poverty that for many IDPs has fueled their dependency onothers. Conditions of displacement were worsened by the fact that there was “no social protection,” soagency fell “on the shoulders of the population” of IDPs themselves. 320 IDPs receive a monthly stipendof 22-28 GEL from the government, a sum of approximately $15/month. 321 One IDP from the first wavestated, “the government gives us about $20 and they tell us we should exist…Tell me how we can exist315 Peter Kabachnik, Joanna Regulska and Beth Mitchneck, 316.316 Marina Guledani, Personal Interview.317 Ibid.318 Senior Fellow, Personal Interview.319 Ibid.320 Marina Guledani, Personal Interview.321 David Chochia, Personal Interview, stated that “IDPs get into debt with supermarkets, pledging their 23 lari every month.”62