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Abstract

During the 2024 parliamentary election campaign, the ruling party, Georgian Dream, used billboards depicting destroyed Ukrainian cities alongside peaceful Georgian towns. The visual contrast reinforced the party’s narrative that Georgia could become a “second front” in the context of the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. Government representatives linked this scenario to the risk of deteriorating relations with the European Union and argued that avoiding tensions with Russia required maintaining a cautious or neutral political stance. The possibility of a “second front” became widely debated in public discourse and played an important role in shaping political attitudes during the election campaign.

This paper examines how collective memories of war and crisis shape contemporary political narratives in Georgia. The research draws on in-depth interviews conducted in 2018 in the regional towns of Borjomi and Telavi and forms part of my doctoral dissertation, “Generations in Transition: The Interplay of History, Trust, and Activism in Georgia’s Social Attitudes.” The study explores how different generations remember key traumatic experiences, including the collapse of the Soviet Union, the conflicts of the 1990s, and the Russo-Georgian War.

Building on the theory of generations developed by Karl Mannheim, the research demonstrates that these historical experiences continue to shape political perceptions and emotional responses across age cohorts. Older respondents often recall the economic collapse and social insecurity of the early 1990s as a defining trauma, while younger generations more strongly associate national vulnerability with the 2008 war. Despite generational differences, memories of war and instability remain central to the collective understanding of political risk.

The Georgian case demonstrates how collective trauma can function as a political resource. By mobilising memories of past conflicts, political actors frame electoral competition through narratives of security and existential threat. The paper argues that such strategies illustrate how memory politics operate in post-Soviet societies and may offer insights for understanding similar dynamics in other parts of the region, including Central Asia.

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Abstract

Why does repression sometimes suppress anti-government protest and at other times catalyze mass mobilization against the state? Existing accounts conceptualize repression primarily as an increase in the cost of dissent, yet they offer limited insight into the mechanisms through which state control reshapes citizens' political behavior. This paper develops an access-based framework that shifts the focus from how much repression a state employs to how repression restructures the channels through which citizens interact with the state and with one another. The framework distinguishes two dimensions of political access: vertical access, the institutionalized pathways linking citizens to state authorities, and horizontal access, the communicative and associational linkages among citizens themselves. Vertical closure transforms the direction of grievances by breaking down the state's grievance absorption mechanism, redirecting dissatisfaction from specific policies toward the regime as such. Yet this reattribution alone does not produce anti-government protest; mobilization requires horizontal access that enables coordination and collective action. Anti-government protest is therefore most likely under a specific configuration: restricted vertical access combined with open horizontal access. The framework further theorizes how the sequence and tempo of access closure generate distinct protest trajectories, including an inverted-U pattern at intermediate levels of repression. These expectations are tested through cross-national time-series analysis and a process-tracing case study of Kazakhstan's January 2022 protests. The findings contribute to debates on the repression-dissent nexus, political opportunity structures, and democratic backsliding by specifying the configurational logic through which repression produces regime-directed contention.

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This study explores how the proverbs in Kyrgyz language function as a form of vernacular heritage that shapes and reflects state tradition in contemporary Kyrgyzstan – in particular, during the current presidency since 2021. While the extant scholarship on Central Asian political legitimacy has extensively focused on formal institutions, elite narratives, and nationalist/populist symbolism, this research examines how everyday linguistic heritage -specifically proverbs, макалдар - involves in constructing political meaning and moral authority in the public sphere. Consistent with the calls to analyse heritage as an active social process, this research treats proverbs as a form of intangible heritage that reconciles relations between tradition, authority, and governance in Kyrgyz society. The analysis draws on a qualitative corpus of Kyrgyz proverbs often included in political speeches, social media discussions, and public commentary during the current presidency. Special emphasis is given to the proverbs that accentuate unity, justice, social responsibility, and resilient leadership. These expressions are interpreted as cultural repertoires that political elites mobilize to frame their ruling in parallel with historical Kyrgyz statehood. The paper claims that proverbs serve three key features. First, they provide culturally resonant language by which political authority can be legitimized. Second, they connect contemporary governance to the narratives of historical Kyrgyz leadership and nomadic state traditions. Finally, they operate as a discursive platform in which citizenry interpret, criticize, and reaffirm state narratives. Utilizing proverbs as political heritage, the study depicts how vernacular cultural forms engage in the reimagining of Kyrgyz statehood.