This event will be hosted in hybrid format. RSVP to attend in person. Please RSVP by no later than 9 am on March 10. Register for the Zoom meeting.
Loyal and compliant security forces undergird any successful autocrat’s bid for political actualization. In Georgia, democratic decline has unfolded rapidly in the last two years, with analysts variously emphasizing the role of geopolitics and the legislative contours of its institutionalization. This project takes a third approach, focusing on the increasing willingness of the state to deploy violence to achieve its goals of political consolidation. Coercive tactics have been undertaken and deployed both through both informal and formal actors, the latter of which has been dominated by the Georgian State Security Service.
This project tracks the institutional transformation of Georgia’s Security Sector, designed variously since 1992 as tools of repression, coup-proofing, but also as entities subject reform toward oversight and law. In particular, it follows both the institutional changes and personnel adaptations that enabled the Georgia’s quick shift from would-be EU democracy to a system working toward consolidating legal autocracy. Early findings indicate that the process for readying the security infrastructure to withstand the rigors of coercion started several years prior to 2022, when the country’s leaders largely abandoned rhetoric of Euro-Atlantic political integration. This timing signals strategic planning on the part of the leadership and highlights an awareness of the need for coup-proofing as a primary path for regime stability.
Julie George is Associate Professor of Political Science at Queens College and The Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY). She holds an appointment as Adjunct Associate Professor at the Harriman Institute/SIPA at Columbia University. Her work focuses on state-building, regime transformation, and identity in the Caucasus, primarily in Georgia. She serves on the editorial boards of Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Problems of Postcommunism, Nationalties Papers, and Caucasus Survey. She has published on ethnic politics and conflict in Georgia, Russia, Azerbaijan and Armenia, as well as on regime processes in Georgia.
