Individualising Uncertainty: A Commentary on Anastasia Shesterinina's Mobilizing in Uncertainty

Anastasia Shesterinina ’ s Mobilizing in Uncertainty (2021) represents a welcome shift in scholarship about mobilization for violence. Focusing on the Georgia-Abkhazia War of 1992 – 1993, Shesterinina challenges the assumption that people engage in cost – bene fi t cal-culations as they embark on a course of action for themselves and their families. Instead, as she shows, ordinary Abkhaz fi ltered information under conditions of uncertainty based upon their past experience. Her account is rich and compelling, and it owes its success in large part to the careful attention she pays to the voices of 142 interlocutors who were carefully selected during Shesterinina ’ s deeply impressive fi eldwork in Abkhazia. Mobilizing in Uncertainty in many ways is an interpretivist project par excellence . It is the meanings also social phenomena time abjure analysis, ’ s interpre-tivism thereby following in the footsteps of scholars like Her framework an individual ’ s ‘ collective fl ict identities, ’ shared understandings of ict the individual ’ s role the made under conditions play precision the if we take of the broad range of social meanings that individuals bring to on lives, ‘ ’ ex-ante ’