Contemporary Security Policy· 2026Q1
Unpacking the precarity-resilience nexus: The case of Georgia
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- Q1SCImago
- 2026year
Short summary
Georgia's ruling Georgian Dream party frames 'resilience' as state capacity to absorb shocks and consolidate power, while grassroots actors demonstrate 'transformative resilience' through bottom-up agency under adversity.
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Key points
- Ruling parties in competitive authoritarian regimes use 'resilience' as a governing rationality.
- State resilience refers to elite capacity to absorb shocks and consolidate power.
- Transformative resilience describes bottom-up agency reclaimed by societal actors under adversity.
- Georgia's Georgian Dream party has actively cultivated state resilience through political and foreign policy strategies.
- Grassroots protests in Georgia indicate ongoing, albeit fragmented, transformative resilience.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
This article asks how resilience operates as a governing rationality in competitive authoritarian regimes. Linking resilience to precarity, the unequal distribution of insecurity, we distinguish state resilience, the capacity of ruling elites to absorb shocks, contain contestation, and consolidate power, from transformative resilience, bottom-up practices through which societal actors reclaim agency under adversity. We develop our argument through the case of Georgia. The ruling party Georgian Dream (GD), which inherited and reproduced conditions of precarity, has coded resilience as sovereignty, stability, and the state’s ability to withstand domestic and external pressure. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and Georgia's 2024 parliamentary elections, GD has combined coalition management, discursive threat framing, multivector foreign policy and legal-institutional tightening to entrench state resilience. At the same time, mass protest and grassroots struggles reveal fragmented but persistent forms of transformative resilience, emerging between an increasingly coercive state and a discredited opposition-civic field.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Contemporary Security Policy, 2026 · DOI ↗
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Field: Economics and Econometrics
Economics and EconometricsEconomics, Econometrics and Finance