Shota Kakabadze “’The Caucasian chalk circle’: Georgia’s self at the East/West nexus”

On 9 November at 16:15 in Zoom room Shota Kakabadze will defend his doctoral dissertation titled “’The Caucasian chalk circle’: Georgia’s self at the East/West nexus“.

Supervisors:
Professor Andrey Makarychev, University of Tartu
Senior Lecturer Dr Maria Mälksoo, University of Kent, Brussels School of International Studies (United Kingdom)

Opponent:
Professor Madina Tlostanova, Linköping University (Sweden)

Synopsis of the dissertation:

This dissertation addresses national identity/foreign policy relationship in the countries located between the European Union and Russia. As a starting point, this research takes the asymmetry between what does the European Union expect from the various projects designed to address immediate neighbors and the expectations among the political elites of the countries concerned. The case study of Georgia reveals the “limbo” these countries are in – on the one hand Eastern Partnership together with the Association Agreement and the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement brings the whole range of legal or market regulations of Georgia close to the EU’s standards.

However, none of these projects imply any membership perspective for the signatory countries thus leaving them in the constant state of becoming. This stage is conceptualized as liminality and discourse theory together with the concept of stigmatization is applied to examine discursive constructions in official documents, speeches and media outlets. For analytical purposes this dissertation pinned down multiple parallel discourses to two basic ones – dominant (pro-Western) and the challenging national identity conceptions. The former constructs Georgia as the part of the European family vis-à-vis the “oriental” and “barbaric” Russia and thus embeds foreign policy trajectory in this civilizational narrative. On the other hand, the challenging articulation of where Georgia belongs at the west/east nexus defines Europe, Christianity or the Soviet past differently from the dominant one, thus reproducing different foreign policy agenda.