Presentation short abstract

The presentation examines the strategic mobilisation of human rights language by the Rioni Valley protest in post-Soviet Georgia through articulating and crafting a counterhegemonic narrative against environmental extraction. Yet, the protest encountered the limits inherent in liberal human rights.

Presentation long abstract

In 2020, four residents of Rioni Valley laid the foundation for the largest environmental protests in post-Soviet Georgia. Two mothers and two sons, with the support of local people, gathered at the site of the planned Namakhvani dam project in the Rioni Valley, where a large orthodox cross was erected as a symbol of the anti-dam protest, marking the beginning of a continuous resistance for 554 days and nights. During the entire resistance, the Rioni Valley Movement strategically mobilized the language of human rights and conscious citizenship as a communicative infrastructure that enabled peripheral agents to become speakable, intelligible, and politically consequential. Yet, this same linguistic apparatus became its own limit. Although the movement consciously developed a counterhegemonic language blending legality, ethics, and a vernacularized vocabulary of human rights and conscious citizenship to gain widespread legitimacy and establish a shared political consciousness across diverse groups, the movement suffered a catastrophic downfall after it joined an anti-Pride demonstration in 2021, leading to the withdrawal of support from crucial allies, including Queer groups, who were supporting them throughout the process. This affective clash caused the language that had initially played an important role in their legitimacy to become the source of its destruction, which was also strategically used by the government and the company. The presentation reveals how the human rights framework becomes a site of state maneuver, where regulatory contradictions are mobilized to contain and neutralize peripheral actors once their political practices exceed the bounds of the liberal human rights paradigm.