This paper examines the dynamics of social and national mobilization in 1970s Georgia, a period marked by political ambiguity, constrained public space, and the complex interplay between Soviet authority and local aspirations. While the Soviet regime sought to maintain a tightly controlled political environment, the decade witnessed the emergence of subtle yet significant forms of collective action that challenged the boundaries of permissible expression. My contribution explores how Georgian activists navigated this uncertainty, developed strategies of resistance, and articulated national and cultural claims within a system designed to suppress them. Focusing on the events surrounding the 1978 language protests and the broader sociopolitical atmosphere of the decade, the paper analyzes how activists interpreted and responded to shifting signals from the state. These movements operated in a context where political rules seemed strict, repression was unpredictable, and opportunities for mobilization were fleeting. Yet, despite these constraints, activists managed to cultivate networks, craft symbolic repertoires, and mobilize around issues that resonated deeply with the public. Their actions reveal how social movements in small and politically dependent states can leverage cultural identity, historical memory, and informal organizational structures to navigate uncertainty. By situating the 1970s movement within the panel’s broader inquiry, the paper highlights several themes: the persistence of certain state - movement dynamics across different regimes, the enduring influence of historical legacies on contemporary mobilizations. Ultimately, this historical case offers insight into how movements adapt under ambiguous political conditions and how their strategies continue to inform the repertoires and expectations of activists in later decades.

During the last decade, Georgia has witnessed significant diversification of social mobilization and political activism. While in the past, political parties and cultural elites stemming from the dissident movement had dominated the public sphere, over the last decade grassroots movements centering on labor rights, direct democracy, social justice, environmental concerns, and opposition to large-scale development projects have emerged as new forces of civic activism. This shift away from established political actors and urban-based civil society organizations has signaled a decentralization of dissent and transformation of public space. Bottom-up mobilizations by students, workers, and local communities in the country have challenged the ruling party's self-presentation as a socially oriented people's government, generating alternative forms of democratic participation and intensifying politicization of pressing social questions. This paper examines how these developments have transformed civil society's political role and its relationship to grassroots struggles in contemporary Georgia. Leftist critiques have long characterized civil society as elitist and disconnected from local mobilization - serving instead to outsource social functions abandoned by neoliberalizing states and instrumentalizing civic institutions to maintain neoliberal hegemony. Yet the convergence of established civil society actors with emerging grassroots movements in response to the ruling party's authoritarian turn reveals more complex dynamics. By analyzing recent anti-authoritarian struggles for defending the democratic principles, this talk reconsiders civil society's evolving role, moving beyond the dichotomies that have dominated post-socialist civil society studies - particularly the framing of co-optation versus resistance. Instead, by revisiting social movements and mobilizations of the past decade, I examine the contested and evolving political terrains where new traditions of democratic engagement and participation have been forged. The central question this paper addresses is: how has the decentralization of dissent catalyzed wider mobilization across professional, social, and cultural divides? What role have civil society actors played in this process, and how have they emerged as agents of democratic contestation rather than disconnected from grassroots? Can established civil society organizations overcome their historical limitations and become genuine forces for democratic resistance - or do they remain constrained by their institutional positioning and relationship to donor-driven frameworks?

In light of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the profound geopolitical and geoeconomic shifts it has triggered globally, particularly among neighbouring states, this paper examines how the Georgian Left has responded to and positioned itself in relation to these changes amid increased uncertainty. As most left-wing movements, the Georgian Left is highly heterogeneous, spanning at least three political generations and encompassing diverse ideological orientations and historical reference frames. It encompasses various actors, such as political parties, civil society organisations, social movements, small collectives and single political individuals. Drawing from ethnographic conversations with more than 30 left-wing actors, conducted between 2022 and 2024, and renewed in summer 2026, the paper investigates how such a landscape of geopolitical orientations could be illustrated and why succinct lines of political cleavages exist among the Georgian Left. Is this because of generational ruptures, ideological disagreements, varying political traditions or something else? It also wants to understand how state-civil society relations can be characterized against this background. As my current empirical data demonstrates, the 2022 war constituted a significant momentum among Georgian leftists. Initially hesitantly led debates intensified around both the underlying mechanisms of the war, such as Russian imperialism, Russia-West competition, and the Georgian government’s foreign policy response, which was interpreted either as pragmatic and advantageous for the country’s economic and security interests or pro-Russian and detrimental with regards to the country’s internal democratization. This discussion became even more pronounced once the political party in power, Georgian Dream, implemented a foreign agent law and announced its temporary break of negotiations with regards to membership perspective in the European Union (EU) (Rekhviashvili et al. 2024; Tempest & Posle Media 2024). Relatedly, this study analyzes the discursive constructions of the ‘collective West’ particularly the European Union and the United States, alongside perceptions of China, whose influence within Georgia has visibly grown in recent years. Speaking to the larger theme of this panel, this paper wants to analyse how the Georgian Left as an example of a social movement actors reflects and reshapes larger political conditions and respective actors and lines of conflict can be interpreted amidst the country’s shifting position in times of strengthened regional authoritarianism and global power competition.