Humanitarian Aid, Development Cooperation, Abkhazia

Throughout the Cold War, the international donor community had confined their effort in conflict situations primarily to humanitarian aid and ideologically motivated development cooperation. Donors were not prepared to deal with the multiple and complex challenges of post-conflict reconstruction. After a period of violent conflict, war-torn societies face many challenges. In many cases they lack the financial, institutional and human resources to solve the problems bounded with post-conflict reconstruction. External actors are asked to play a more active role in assisting countries emerging from conflicts, but there are legal, budgetary and ethical limits of humanitarian aid and development cooperation. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate on the case study of Abkhazia, that the classical paradigm of linear cycle of post-conflict reconstruction via the fluent transformation from a short term humanitarian aid to a longer term development cooperation, simply can not function in separatist regions.