Paper short abstract

This paper analyses Georgia’s autocratic transition, in which legality becomes a governing agent by producing an atmospheric lawscape that generates an affective force of law, chasing and surrounding citizens and enclosing protest and social life.

Paper long abstract

Since 2024, after two decades of democratic transition of post-Soviet Georgia, the country has undergone a rapid shift toward an autocracy, erasing the legal architecture of democratic governance through the totalizing presence of legality itself - a process described as autocratic legalism (Scheppele 2018). An obsessive overproduction of laws targeting citizens, protest movements, and civil society organizations has transformed social life into a visible atmosphere of lawscapes (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2015). Here, the erosion of democracy does not entail the disappearance or absence of law, but its arbitrary, parasitic, and performative restructuring into the semiotics of power and control. This engineered atmosphere of lawscape produces the affective force of law as it travels through streets, protest sites, homes, and bodies, surrounding rather than confronting. Law chases by enclosing, generating an atmosphere in which legality becomes unavoidable and omnipresent. Bodies do not merely encounter the law; they become its carriers through which legality is enacted and made visible. The law does not exist without these bodies, relying on their movements, anticipations, and fears to sustain its presence.

Drawing on long-term ethnography into protest policing, court monitoring, legislative mobilizations, and their affects, I argue that through writing, unwriting, and rewriting, law becomes both the site and the machine of a spectacular and public project of democratic ruination. Here, law does not cease to exist; rather, it governs through its performative and atmospheric presence, through which legality is learned, feared, and navigated.