How Local Conflict Dynamics and Geopolitics Shaped the Initiation and Deployment of the UN Observer Mission in Georgia: Evidence from the UN Archives

How can local conflict dynamics and geopolitics shape the initiation and deployment of a United Nations (UN) observer mission? The article tackles this question using a case study of the UN Observer Mission in Georgia (UNOMIG), deployed in response to the Georgia-Abkhazia war (1992–1993) and uses the mission’s archive to reconstruct how the UN managed its response to a separatist war in a newly independent former Soviet republic. The article argues the normative and operational identities of the UN, and the tensions and trade-offs this ‘dual identity’ can create when guiding choices about how to act, shaped the ways in which UN personnel within the Secretariat and the mission responded to external pressures created by the character of the conflict and the geopolitical context in which it took place. The study combines an empirically detailed investigation of an overlooked but important case of UN intervention with the analytical insight that the UN is both a normative actor committed to upholding international norms and peacekeeping principles and an operational actor mandated to manage threats to international peace and security.