Peculiarities of Social Protest Formation in Georgia
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Date
2019-06
Authors
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Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi state university, Faculty of social and political sciences
Abstract
In post-Soviet Georgia government and society experienced a long way of confrontation. The Lack of legitimacy of the government, the weakness of political institutions, as well as social-economic and political problems were the main factors, that provoked a protest lead by the politicians - aimed to resign the government and gain power. In this protest citizens where part of decoration.
Nowadays we face an upraise of various social groups and transformation of the protest repertoire from resigning government to policy change. This process can be observed from 2012, since a change of the government launched new windows for opportunities. Contentious movements including ecological, labor, LGBT, marihuana decriminalization make their voice heard, collect followers, close protest stage for politicians from opposition political parties, confront or collaborate with the decision makers and trying to reach their goals using different kind of strategies. Alongside to this process, the floor for the anti-governmental political pretest has disappeared. Above mentioned changes mostly influenced the demands and the topics of protest movements. If previous movements reach their goals through a change of government, contemporary protest movements aim to change policies. This process, from our point of view can be discussed as an indicator of positive changes toward the attitude to the political institutes.
We will analyze the dynamics of the protest movements in 2003-2018. This timeframe includes a period of mass protest (2003-2010); appearing social groups and launching their protest (2010-2012; 2015-2018) and a perod of silence (2013-2014). Within the research, we rely on the theory of structural functionalism, so called “windows of opportunities” (Tilly, Tarrow) that attempts to explain that movements are conditioned by the social and political situation, while the uprising of movements can be
explained by the decrease of trust and influence of political parties. The main aims of this research are to analyze: factors of protest transformation; how and why developments of various social groups where provoked how these social groups are trying to transform themselves to the political elite, to influence on the solution of the issue.
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Keywords
Georgia, civil society, social movement, transformation of protest, საქართველო, სამოქალაქო საზოგადოება, სოციალური მოძრაობა, პროტესტის ტრანსფორმაცია