“This is something that you don’t fully comprehend until you face it.”
The small, historically important and culturally rich country of Georgia, nestled in the Caucasus between Turkey, Russia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, has seen nonstop street protests for months, taking over the centre of the capital city, surrounding the nation’s parliament, and challenging the ruling party. Police violence and “shocking human rights violations” against the protestors, including the use of torture and shock troops, have only served to enflame public sentiment and increase support for the resistance.
The two most recent actions by the government that inspired such ongoing resistance were a cancellation delay of Georgia’s EU membership bid and the enactment of a ‘foreign agent’ law that classified as spies any organisation (even animal shelters) receiving more than 20% of their funds from overseas. More changes in law and policy have followed, including draconian limits on the rights to assemble and speak freely.
The issues run deeper still. As a former Soviet republic, Georgia has also struggled to define itself as separate from and outside the sphere of influence of Russia. Putin’s 2008 invasion of Georgia might well have been the first European war of the 21st century, and the muted response from the international community was a modern revival of “appeasement”. Russia’s willingness in that conflict to use violence to carve up another country’s territory also proved to be a grim harbinger of the current war in Ukraine.
Marika Mikiashvili is a lecturer at Alte University in Tbilisi and a member of the Droa Party, which belongs to the Coalition for Change, standing in opposition to the incumbent party, Georgian Dream. She provides a wealth of background and historical perspective to contextualise the independent and pro-European aspirations of the Georgian people, as well as sharing her own personal experience of living through a constitutional democracy’s sudden shift towards authoritarianism.
You can find Marika on X where her handle is @Mikiashvili_M.
Background image by George Khelashvili.
Share this post