From Civil Society to Universities: The Erosion of Democracy in Georgia

Since 2024, Georgia has seen wave after wave of protests — different actors, different triggers, different streets. To an outside observer, it looks like a series of separate crises. But I want to suggest a different way of reading it: not as disconnected events, but as a single structure repeating itself across scales. Like a fractal, the pattern visible at the largest geopolitical level reappears, recognisably, when you zoom in to the smallest. And that pattern, at every scale, is a fight against injustice.

The injustice of a foreign agent law designed to silence civil society. The injustice of elections that many consider fraudulent. The injustice of a government moving against its own constitutional mandate for European integration. Abstract at the top, this injustice trickles downward — into institutions, into disciplines, into individual lives. It reaches students, academics, the most vulnerable, and the most vocal. Today I want to move through these scales, from the largest down to the most intimate: the individual voice, and the stubborn refusal to give up.

The vagueness is the point

Georgian Dream, the governing party, has built its legitimising narrative on a single, elastic word: peace. It positions itself as the defender of sovereignty against Western interference, the protector of traditional values against what it variously calls the ‘global war party’, the ‘deep state’, or ‘liberal fascism’. Yet it does not explain what these terms actually mean. That vagueness is not a rhetorical failure — it is the strategy. Philosopher Justin D'Ambrosio calls this manipulative underspecification: keeping terms deliberately broad so they can be filled with whatever content is useful in a given moment, imagined differently by different audiences.

Every demand — for democracy, for rights, for European integration — receives the same response: peace. This word absorbs everything. Every injustice is dissolved into it. It is not a guarantee of peace. It is a guarantee of submission. And it is borrowed from a playbook circulating across an authoritarian network: the idea that the choice is between this government and catastrophe, and that any resistance is therefore irresponsible.

The law that hollows things out

Authoritarianism needs instruments. Georgian Dream's most important instrument is the foreign agent law — modelled explicitly on its Russian counterpart, it was passed in 2024 and is designed to work not through outright prohibition but through the systematic production of risk. Any organisation receiving more than 20 per cent of its funding from abroad must register as an entity serving foreign interests. Civil society organisations face a stark choice: register with all the stigma and surveillance that entails, or lose the international funding on which they depend. The chilling effect has been immediate.

But the logic doesn't stop at the NGO sector. It trickles into universities. International grants — the lifeblood of serious research — become legally treacherous. Entire fields are exposed: sociology, gender studies, political science, disciplines whose methodology involves critical inquiry and whose funding is almost by definition international. They are not banned. They are made difficult enough to abandon. Individual researchers face the same logic: scholars may be required to disclose the identities of confidential interviewees or interlocutors. Their research isn't prohibited. It is made dangerous enough to stop.

This is the fractal in operation. What the agent law does to civil society at the national scale, it does to universities at the institutional scale, to disciplines at the departmental scale, and to individual researchers at the most personal scale. The form is the same at every level: identify what is internationally connected, reframe that connection as foreign influence, make its continuation costly enough to discourage.

A banner on a building

Alongside the agent law came higher education reforms: centralised research funding, state-produced textbooks, government control over hiring, plans to sell university campuses to private investors. Those of us in Georgian universities felt a strange sense of recognition. This was what Orbán did in Hungary. You do not abolish a university dramatically. You dissolve it administratively. Remove funding independence. Standardise the textbooks. Sell the campus. Leave the name on the door and hollow out everything behind it.

A banner now hangs on the façade of my university, Ilia State University, in central Tbilisi: ‘Our university is not for sale.’ It protests a specific plan. But it means something larger — an institution declaring publicly that it understands what is being taken from it. Ilia State University, one of the most vocal institutions and number one for research in Georgia, is reduced to only 8 per cent of its current programmes, and its student body has been cut to one-tenth. This feels like an injustice to an institution that is home to so many excellent scholars, ideas, and voices. The move will force a brain drain if its academics give up the fight.

And here is where geopolitics intersects with individual lives most starkly. Georgia's proposed reforms would spell the end for compatibility with the Bologna Process, the framework governing mutual recognition of degrees across Europe. Erasmus semesters would become mostly inaccessible. Those who have the means will find workarounds. Those without will find doors closed that were open before. It will also deeply affect ethnic minorities, for whom Ilia State is a preferred higher education institution. What was once a public good becomes a privilege. The geopolitical shift, at this most personal scale, is also a deepening of inequality — and the reason why the protests, at every scale, continue.

In May, students at Ilia State University raised 2,000,000 GEL — roughly 800,000 euros — for children with a rare disease. Under threat of being silenced, they turned outward to help those most in need, and Georgian society responded. The solidarity was striking: students have far more support than those in power may assume. It is a reminder that the battles are as interconnected as the injustices — and so are the solidarities.

Dr Ketevan Gurchiani is a professor of anthropology at Ilia State University in Tbilisi, Georgia.