Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
UACES 55th Annual Conference 2025, Liverpool, İngiltere, 31 Ağustos - 03 Eylül 2025, ss.1, (Özet Bildiri)
The Caucasian isthmus is a historically significant mesoregion situated at the confluence of overlapping imperial influences that have shaped its trajectory over centuries. The enduring nature of these influences has prompted profound transformations in the region’s geo-cultural identity, socio-economic relations, and demographic composition, characterized by fluid allegiances to the imperial centers. Following Alfred Rieber’s characterization of contested imperial fringes, Georgia emerges as a salient case within this context, functioning as a ‘complex frontier’ where Russia, Turkey, and Iran have historically vied for dominance and control. In the wake of the Cold War, Western power centers have entered the arena as significant extra-regional actors, striving to assert their influence in the former imperial borderlands. The Eastern Partnership (EaP) initiative of the European Union, which initially included six former Soviet republics along with Georgia, has played a crucial role in this endeavor, seeking to dissociate the country from its historical imperial legacy. However, it has inadvertently contributed to Russia’s military assertiveness and aggressive policies directed at the entire post-Soviet Europe, including within the EaP framework. Against this backdrop, the paper focuses on Georgia’s recent internal political crisis, which has been exacerbated by political elites’ ambitions to articulate subjectivity in independently shaping the nation’s foreign policy trajectory, currently leaning towards accommodating the aggressive great power to the North as part of a broader pivot to the East. However, this pivot has faced strong public dissent advocating for continued commitment to European integration. The paper will argue that such a discrepancy between the elites’ accommodating stance and popular resistance signifies incompleteness in geo-cultural identity formation and the persistent liminality in Georgia’s foreign policy behavior. By examining Georgia’s geo-cultural and geopolitical in-betweenness, the paper will employ the concept of liminality – a theoretical framework initially articulated in social anthropology by Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner, later extended to the field of International Relations. This concept provides a valuable framework for understanding the challenges small states face as they seek to define their place in the changing international order. By examining Georgia’s liminality, this paper aims to illuminate the broader dynamics of imperial borderlands and the lasting effects of imperial legacies on contemporary geopolitics in the Caucasian isthmus.