CBEES Advanced Seminar “Reimagining Georgia: Images of Georgia Held by the Collective West, Russian, and Georgian Political Elites from 1991 to 2020” with Natia Gamkrelidze, Senior Lecturer in Political Science, Linnaeus University

Speaker: Natia Gamkrelidze, Senior Lecturer in Political Science, Linnaeus University.

Discussant: Niklas Nilsson, Associate Professor in War Studies at the Land Operations Division, Department of War Studies and Military History, Swedish Defence University.

Chair: Julia Malitska, Researcher and Senior Lecturer at the School of History and Contemporary Studies, and Research Coordinator at Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES), Södertörn University.

Abstract: This compilation thesis examines the United States (U.S.), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the European Union (EU), Russian, and Georgian political elites’ images of Georgia from the regaining of Georgia’s independence in 1991 up to 2020. This topic shows the significance of studying the role of the agency of individual leaders and including them as a level of analysis when analyzing different geopolitical setups. The empirical data come from the author’s 102 original interviews with political elites from Georgia, the U.S., NATO and the EU, including presidents, prime ministers, ministers, secretaries, secretaries-general, and Russian foreign policy experts. This dissertation comprises four articles, each using the same research design.
The findings of this dissertation show that over time, external and internal political elites hold somewhat varying images of Georgia. These diverging images that mainly emerged after the Rose Revolution of 2003 have a geopolitical character and are crucial for understanding Georgia’s strained geopolitical context. In particular, they reflect a rift between the U.S., NATO, the EU, Georgia, and Russia with regard to the perception of the threat to and cultural status of Georgia. This has chiefly influenced the type of imagery of Georgia that the actors hold and has contributed to the changing geopolitical conditions. Overall, changes in internal and external political elites’ perceptions and attention to image variation help explain policy variation over time.