Short Abstract

This panel explores how the post-Soviet South Caucasus embodies global ideological crises, examining coloniality, neoliberalism, and moral imaginaries while tracing feminist, queer, and decolonial disruptions beyond East/West and democracy/authoritarian binaries.

Long Abstract

Since the fall of socialism, the South Caucasus has come to embody a condensed version of the global crisis of ideologies: a region suspended between competing imperial and epistemic projects, where the unfinished legacies of Soviet modernity intersect with the disillusionments of the liberal international order. Emerging as a byproduct of Russian coloniality, the postcolonial “inferiority complex” (Tlostanova 2012) has manifested as a symbolic form of self-whitening, suppressing alternative political and social imaginaries. Yet this landscape of ideological exhaustion also holds potential for new beginnings: for re-grounding thought and politics in locally generated vocabularies that neither imitate nor reject external hegemonies but seek to provincialize and disrupt them.

As Russian imperial power reasserts itself through war (Shevtsova 2024), authoritarianism, and conservative moral governance, Euro-Atlantic coloniality simultaneously reproduces hierarchies of “civilizational belonging” (Tlostanova 2010) and neoliberal governance under banners of integration and democracy promotion. The clash of hegemonies fractures societies, compelling intellectuals, activists, and citizens to navigate a shrinking field of possibility between two collapsing universalisms. Yet it also opens space for imagining how minor theory, as conceptual sabotage and creative misalignment, might emerge from these fractures, refusing new universals while dismantling architectures of global reason that frame the region as derivative.

This panel invites anthropological and interdisciplinary contributions exploring how the post-Soviet condition shapes ideological divisions, moral imaginaries, and alignments in the South Caucasus not as static binaries (East/West, tradition/modernity, democracy/authoritarianism) but as dynamic, contested, and relational processes. We seek to understand how coloniality, post-socialist transition, and global economic, ecological, and epistemic crises co-produce new configurations of belief, belonging, and exclusion: through afterlives of Soviet internationalism confronting neoliberal and nationalist imaginaries; entanglements of local moral economies with competing “civilizational projects”; feminist, queer, and decolonial disruptions of ideological capture; and everyday reinventions of solidarity among those caught between shifting regimes.

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