Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how deaths of the 2008 war and Russian occupation are currently invoked in Georgian political discourse. Re-enlivened, they turn past sacrifice into present mobilisation: as sites of contested sovereignty and sources of resistance seeking to repair fractured political horizons.

Paper long abstract

“Why is Giorgi Antsukhelidze not at home today?” This question was asked rhetorically by commission chair Tea Tsulukiani in April 2025 during a parliamentary inquiry into the political decisions surrounding the 2008 Russo-Georgian war. The war caused more than 2,000 injured and dead and left 20% of Georgian territory under Russian occupation. Tsulukiani’s remark was followed by the claim that Antsukhelidze, who was brutally killed during the hostilities and is widely regarded as a national hero, had been “pointlessly doomed for someone’s PR” — that “someone” being then-president Saakashvili, and the alleged “PR” depicting Russia as an evil aggressor. The statement sparked immediate public outrage; within hours, a rally had formed to protest what many saw as a treasonous insult to Antsukhelidze and other heroes martyred in the war and the ongoing occupation.

This paper traces the contemporary reappearance and circulation of figures such as Antsukhelidze in Georgian political discourse. As the work of the Tsulukiani commission illustrates, their deaths are increasingly invoked as examples of “death in vain,” instrumentalised to discredit political rivals and recast the moral narrative of the 2008 war. Yet these attempts at reframing are met with popular insistence that the deaths of those confronting the Russian occupier can never be rendered meaningless. Departing from this tension, I examine how deaths caused by Russian occupation are presently re-enlivened, turning past sacrifice into present mobilisation: as sites of contested sovereignty and as sources of popular resistance seeking to repair the fractured political horizons these heroes died defending.