Johns Hopkins University Press

After years of democratic backsliding, Georgia experienced a dramatic shift toward autocratization in 2024, with the Georgian Dream government passing restrictive laws and manipulating parliamentary elections. However, Georgian society's response has grown more determined and inclusive, demonstrating a pattern of cyclical resilience where autocratization and democratic resistance unfold in parallel. While this pushback has not yet sparked a democratic turnaround, it has ensured fierce contestation of autocratic moves. The case of Georgia illuminates how pluralistic values and civic mobilization can serve as primary sources of resilience, even when formal institutional safeguards falter. Georgia's experience shows that democratic culture can deepen even as autocratization advances.

After years of democratic backsliding, in 2024 Georgia's government lurched dramatically in the direction of autocratization. Among other illiberal measures, the Georgian Dream (GD) government in May passed a law restricting "foreign agents" as a means of taking freedom away from civil society and the media. In October, the government brazenly manipulated parliamentary elections to retain power, and then announced that it would suspend EU-accession talks until 2028. An emblematic and disquieting example of autocratization, Georgia is also an important test case of democratic resilience. Georgian society's responses to these autocratic moves have become more determined and more widely inclusive. While this pushback has not—as of this writing in early December 2024—been enough to spark a democratic turnaround, it has ensured that autocratization is being fiercely contested.

Beyond the drama of shifting daily events, the case of Georgia sheds light on broader debates about democratization. Georgia shows how autocratization and democratic resilience can unfold in parallel with each other over successive political crises—a pattern that we term cyclical resilience. The case illuminates the potential power but also limitations of democratic resilience. With GD set to begin a new four-year term, it might seem that democratic resilience has failed. Democratic resistance is clearly intensifying, however. Pluralism is too deeply embedded in Georgian society for GD to be able to root it out. Illiberal measures may pass, but this pluralism will ensure that Georgia's potential ability to reverse autocratization will endure.

The Georgian crisis has unfolded against the backdrop of shifting debates about autocratization and democratization. Some trends point to a [End Page 123] renewed deepening and tightening of authoritarian dynamics. Most countries that have moved toward greater autocracy in recent years have undergone significant democratic breakdown. International, economic, and social factors are pushing many beyond modest democratic backsliding and into familiar forms of dictatorship.1 As part of this trend, we have seen new measures to curtail civil society and a number of falsified elections.

This worrisome climate makes understanding democratic resilience even more important. It can be defined as a political system's ability to prevent or respond to challenges so as to maintain or restore its democratic features.2 Ideally, resilience occurs early enough to stop major autocratization before it starts, but it can also shore up democracy in the face of acute breakdown.3 Resilience manifests itself in strategies of resistance pursued by different actors: formal institutions, political parties, civil society groups, and the wider political community.4 In some cases, resilience is enabled by autocrats not having control over strong state capacity, while in others it is rooted in increasingly strong societies.5

Resilience is not tied to a single election result, but entails resistance over time and across cycles of regime fluctuation. Where institutional and societal resilience lock firmly together in a single dynamic, democratic resilience is likely to be further reaching. Patterns of resilience vary according to how (and how deeply) a state is autocratizing; resilience in a closed autocracy differs from resilience in a limited democracy. Understanding why the types, sources, levels, and outcomes of resilience vary across countries is still a challenge, however. As countries such as Brazil, Guatemala, Poland, and Zambia have turned away at least in part from autocratization, the challenge has only gained salience.6

In Georgia, the prime sources of resilience are pluralistic values now widespread in society, plus civic mobilization that backs them up. Formal resilience—the kind that involves institutions and political parties—is less notable. The Georgian case shows that dynamics hostile to authoritarianism can gather on a sustained basis in a place on the timescale between early resilience and resilience reactive to a breakdown. It also shows that resilience need not be linear, but can endure and fluctuate over sustained periods. Autocratization may gain the upper hand, only to have democratic resilience take it away, and vice-versa. The advantage may seesaw back and forth for a long time with no clear resolution.

Since regaining independence in 1991, Georgia has witnessed persistent political fluctuations. It suffered a military coup and revolution and has gone through regular bouts of political turbulence. The two parties that have held power over the last twenty years—the United National Movement (UNM) and GD—have both displayed dominant-party tendencies. Each started out making democratic progress, then drifted into authoritarian power-centralization. Following the 2003 Rose Revolution, the UNM government under President Mikheil Saakashvili built democratic institutions and tackled corruption, yet later moved to erode political freedoms. [End Page 124]

Since the democratic transfer of power in 2012, GD has largely repeated this pattern, with the ruling party gradually capturing state institutions and coopting or neutralizing other power centers that might offer opposition. The GD government has steadily moved from socioeconomic populism to a globally familiar variant of conservative-illiberal autocratization. It has challenged women's rights, abolished gender quotas, and constricted LGBTQ rights. Civil servants and academics have been forced from their jobs. During the 2024 campaign, GD misused state resources for electioneering purposes while threatening to ban opposition parties if it won another term.7 The sharp polarization that splits GD from the UNM has compounded autocratization. Structural rigging set into place well before polling day allowed GD to control the October elections.

At a level deeper than the tumults of party politics, pluralism has gained ground among Georgia's people and civil society has grown in fortitude. Every crisis and bout of regression has seen democratic culture sink its roots deeper. Georgia now boasts an especially well-regarded and formalized civil society, a thickened stratum of emerging activists, and increasingly prominent citizen mobilization. A stimulus to this growth of democratic pluralism has been Russia's nefarious influence. The full-scale invasion of Ukraine that Putin launched in February 2022—after years of intimidation and seizures of Ukrainian territory—propelled Georgians' democratic engagement to dramatic new heights. Georgian state institutions may be captive to a dominant-party regime, but this has not stopped civic resilience from gathering strength as Georgian people rally to the cause of safeguarding democracy. New civic actors and forms of societal activism born in the late 2010s have increasingly contributed to this resilience.

Georgia might be seen as a midpoint case on the spectrum of autocratization. It does not require a turnaround from a closed autocracy, but suffers from more than a mere dip in the quality of consolidated liberal democracy. The Varieties of Democracy Project (V-Dem) has placed Georgia in its category of "electoral democracies" since 1990, while the Economist Intelligence Unit has classified Georgia as a hybrid regime since 2007. Cyclical resilience is a better description of the case than either onset or breakdown resilience, respectively. Georgia shows how in such middling instances, pluralism and democratic culture can deepen even as autocratization is advancing—but also that even when pluralism is present, containing autocratization will be onerous.

A History of Resilience

As GD has tightened its hold on power, democratic resistance has strengthened. Laws clamping down on civil society via restrictions on "foreign agents" have been passed in Egypt, Nicaragua, and Russia, but all were set in place against civil societies that did not organize massively [End Page 125] against in response. In Georgia, by contrast, civic pluralism has been building up for many years, and society can push back. The GD government first tried to advance its bill to ensure that foreign influence on Georgian civic groups is what it terms "transparent" in March 2023. At that time, massive protests forced the bill's withdrawal. When Parliament finally passed the measure into law in June 2024, the legislature was overriding President Salome Zourabichvili's veto. The civic mobilization that forced the 2023 withdrawal showed the potential of societal resilience. This suggests that forms of resilience often mirror forms of autocratization. As assaults on the civic space have come to the fore in the process of autocratization, so has the societal strand of resilience grown more prominent in response.

Georgians are enduringly intolerant of autocratic rule.8 Four times since 1991, the year Georgia almost unanimously voted yes in an independence referendum and left the Soviet Union, mass street protests have ousted a government. Up to the current crisis, society always played a large role in containing turns toward autocracy. This was especially evident during the late 1990s and mid-2000s, when state institutions were poorly developed or fully captured, and citizens' demand for democracy fortified democratic resilience.

As a young democratic activist insisted to us: "Georgia is neither Russia nor Belarus … no government has been able to suppress us." (We interviewed activists and people from civil society in Tbilisi from 1 to 4 October 2024, and subsequent quotes in this essay come from those conversations.) Over the years, societal resilience has gained strength and prominence alongside growing public support for democracy. The 2024 Caucasus Barometer opinion poll shows that 67 percent of Georgians prefer democracy to any other system—a significant rise from 49 percent in 2019.9 Society's heightened readiness to fight for democracy emerged as a leading theme in our talks with Georgians.

The more formal, institutional pathways to resilience have been less consequential in Georgia than in cases of more decisive redemocratization such as Brazil or Poland. In the early years of both the UNM and GD governments, reformers from civil society held key posts such as public defender and deputy Parliament speaker, and they helped to reinforce institutional guardrails. Each administration, however, gradually took on features of dominant-party rule. Reformers lost their jobs and institutional checks and balances were badly compromised. As state capacities have strengthened, autocratic state capture has hit harder and posed a bigger challenge to the forces of democratic resilience.

The GD government has aimed to sap institutions of their resilience. Over the last decade, the party has tightened its grip on the central election commission and the office of the public defender. The independent-minded State Inspector's Service was abolished. After years of working with Western militaries, the Georgian army has kept out of politics, but [End Page 126] the government has used police, special forces, and increasingly the state-security services to attack and intimidate civil society and protesters.

If the judicial system has been the most effective source of democratic resilience in other countries, in Georgia its influence in that regard has been marginal. A government-aligned "clan" of judges has gradually risen in both higher and lower courts as the government weeds out independent-minded jurists. In 2023, the U.S. State Department sanctioned judges as high-ranking as members of the high judicial council for undermining the rule of law. President Zourabichvili, more than a hundred civil society and media organizations, and the parliamentary opposition have challenged the "foreign agents" law in the Constitutional Court, but without much hope of winning. In December 2024, the Constitutional Court rejected a legal challenge from the president and opposition politicians over the constitutionality of the election results.

Alone among top institutions and officeholders, President Zourabichvili has offered clear prodemocratic leadership. A former French and Georgian diplomat who had been elected with a 59 percent majority in the 2018 runoff, she came to office with GD's endorsement, but would later draw its ire for using her veto power against its excesses. The GD government cut her staff and funding, and in 2023 attempted to impeach her on the charge of representing Georgia abroad without government permission. The vote to convict her fell short, however. President Zourabichvili has stood up as an important institutional guardian of Georgia's democracy. On October 27, she charged that a "Russian special operation" had corrupted the elections, and added that nothing could make them legitimate.10 After the government's shock move on EU talks, she stated that she would not step down from power until new elections were called.

The gap between societal pluralism and the personalistic stasis of the political sphere is especially wide in Georgia. Countries with more checkered records of societal pluralism have more dynamic party politics than Georgia does. In an unprecedented attempt to address this perennial problem, opposition parties in 2024 agreed to join forces based on a common charter that was President Zourabichvili's brainchild. They failed to agree on how they would form a government, however, and wanted to keep their distance from the badly tarnished UNM. While it was a step forward, the charter was not enough to stop the GD steal.

Protests and Resistance

Georgia is one of many countries where robust citizen protests belie the global storyline of autocratization. Far from being an era of citizen apathy, the last several years have witnessed, around the world, an increase in protest intensity and bottom-up resistance to autocratization.11 Skeptics note, however, that most revolts have failed to drive autocrats from power.12 [End Page 127]

Despite the ups and downs that protests have seen in Georgia—achieving change that then unravels—our interviews on the ground suggest that this time, things are different. Georgia's most recent protest dynamics could help the country to achieve a kind of "unified field" resilience, with institutions, civil society, the general public, and the political parties all pulling together. A protest leader told us that the scale of unity around "the survival of Georgia's democracy" was unprecedented. The lack of a single leader has not hampered protest organization or communications. Coordination has relied on crowdfunding and the use of Facebook and Signal groups, with constant amplification by means of viral Instagram and TikTok videos. Around the country, new social movements have emerged. A prominent activist told us that "nothing has spurred democratic participation in Georgia like these protests. This marks the birth of a modern, democratic Georgian society."

The protests are exceptional in their depth, scope, and the degree to which the general public has become involved. From the reintroduction of the "foreign agents" law in April 2024 until its final adoption in June, several demonstrating crowds exceeded a hundred thousand—an extraordinary figure in a country of fewer than four-million people. As the October elections neared, mobilization again ramped up. Citizens who had never before turned out for a political cause took to the streets. One civil society representative told us, "This is more than protest against a single law or a single governmental decision—this is mass mobilization of the society to defend a future trajectory."

In the first half of 2024, the spirit of protest solidarity was widespread across the nation. Bus drivers went on strike to help protesters block main streets, pharmacies provided first aid free of charge, cafes and restaurants opened their doors to offer warm drinks at night, and citizens offered free food and beverages to their fellow protesters. Prominent Georgian singers and artists organized a concert to crowdfund legal costs and pay fines of those arrested at the protests. Something approximating a national resistance movement had developed, penetrating schools, diplomatic representations, businesses, artistic centers, and even the public sector, which mostly has been loyal to the ruling authorities.13 One young activist with whom we spoke described a "unity of people with radically different backgrounds, political mindsets and philosophy, political tastes, economic and social backgrounds."

The protests also bridged the divide between rural and urban areas, with revolts erupting in larger cities on an unprecedented scale but also finding an echo in smaller towns. Protesters launched an innovative grassroots "hosting" initiative to crowdfund people from regions who wished to come to Tbilisi to protest. Capital residents told us how they had opened their homes to strangers in order to help the fight for democracy. Online groups emerged to pay travel costs or arrange carpools so that demonstrators could get home after public transport had closed. [End Page 128] As one of the lead activists told us, "The greater the pressure from the government and special forces, the newer and more creative initiatives emerged. During these days, I felt part of a political community. I am convinced it is impossible for any government to defeat this spirit."

Opposition leaders had a limited role in the preelection protests, but citizens (many of them not supporters of any party) filled the gap and made it hard for GD to paint the revolt as the work of a partisan faction. As is normal, most protesters were young, but older Georgians desiring a European and democratic future for their country were in evidence as well. The bitter split between GD and the UNM, long the central fact of Georgian politics, seemed largely irrelevant to young demonstrators.

While not partisan, protesters did acknowledge a need to channel demands into the political sphere—failure to accomplish this had undermined previous cycles of revolt. Comparative analysis points out that protests against repressive laws succeed only when activists can link protests to politicians' interest in winning elections.14 If the crucial democracy test is not just for protests to be forceful but for them to connect to the political sphere, Georgia in 2024 passed the exam. Young protesters moved in unprecedented numbers into the opposition alliance-building initiatives, and also proved vital in fielding the largest civic effort to monitor elections Georgia has ever seen. As an interviewee in Tbilisi told us, "the opposition political parties were compelled to respond to the Georgian public's call for unity … they have finally come together."

The ruling party's blatant election manipulations rekindled the demonstrations. Thousands of Georgians rallied before Parliament after the president and key opposition parties condemned the results as bogus. Another frontier of unity between societal and institutional resilience was passed as political parties, the president's office, citizens, and organized civil society joined in opposition to rigging and fraud. Political and civil society leaders are now on the same page. In November, civic and political leaders announced the formation of a national resistance movement. After GD announced it was halting talks with the EU, even larger protests erupted across the country, with the participation of a wider range of groups, deploying new tactics and calling more assertively for the elections to be rerun. These fresh protests were met with even harsher repression.

Civil society organizations (CSOs) are now more engaged with both protesters and the general public, widening the sphere of prodemocracy [End Page 129] activism. In our extensive consultations in Tbilisi, CSO leaders acknowledged that they had been too focused on foreign funders and stakeholders, and that the 2023 revolt over the "foreign agents" law had changed this. Many CSOs have shifted to a more grassroots approach and more closely aligned their efforts with those of protesters. Well-known CSOs were crucial in revealing the extent of GD fraud—revelations that fed the postelection protests. Our interlocutors spoke of new triangular alliances among formal CSOs, newer social movements, and citizens at large.

For all this, protests in Georgia have their limits. Social movements are not firmly institutionalized, which hinders their staying power, and the autocratizing GD government remains in place—at least at the time of this writing in early December 2024. Formal institutions and society still relate to each other in patchy ways and this remains a weak point in Georgia's democratic resilience compared to what is seen in other countries. One activist lamented to us that the international community "tends to romanticize protests" and fails to see their internal shortcomings. In the aftermath of manipulated elections, regularized resistance at all levels needs to replace sporadic demonstrations if intensified GD autocratization is to be held at bay.

Altered EU Dynamics

As Georgia is a candidate for EU membership, the role of transnational dynamics in democratic resilience merits special consideration in this case. Analysts long stressed how EU enlargement helped democratic transitions. The EU's democracy-related preconditions for entry gave elites potent reasons to adopt political reforms. In the 2010s, however, enlargement stalled and the prospect of EU accession was unable to prevent democratic backsliding in Turkey and the Balkans. Attention then shifted to enlargement's shortcomings as a force for democratization and democratic consolidation.

Georgian CSO leaders and democratic reformers have criticized the EU's role in their country. Years of EU work with courts and state agencies have not stopped GD from closing its grip on them. While CSOs and opposition parties welcomed the EU's December 2023 decision to open a formal accession process with Georgia, the announcement gave GD a boost (however inadvertent) and made it more confident about bringing back the "foreign agents" law in early 2024. The government calculated that its geopolitical hedging between the EU and Russia would encourage European governments to put aside concerns about democracy.15 Opposition and CSO leaders in Tbilisi told us that they thought the EU was too soft on the GD government immediately after the decision to award candidate status. Civil society leaders also criticized the EU ambassador for seeming to be ambivalent about GD repression and the 2024 protests. [End Page 130]

Taking a step back, we see that despite its occasional equivocations, the EU has helped to galvanize societal mobilization in Georgia and enhanced resilience at all levels. The 2014 association agreement, the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area agreement, and then visa liberalization are evidence of the EU's longterm engagement.

There are signs that the EU has learned from previous rounds of enlargement and may be adapting in ways that could further boost democratic resilience in Georgia. As 2024 wore on, the EU and its member states (plus Britain and the United States) gradually halted high-level contacts, security cooperation, and aid projects. In July, the EU froze the accession process and suspended 40 million euros of security-sector support. The EU then announced that democratic backsliding would cost the Georgian government 121 million euros in annual budget support. After the elections, the EU promised to send an investigative mission to look into electoral fraud and reiterated that accession would stay frozen until Georgia returned to a democratic path. Member states' admonishment of Viktor Orbán's trip to Tbilisi to congratulate GD on its victory was unprecedented. In December, the governments of the three Baltic states imposed sanctions on GD officials.

Crucially for the societal dimension of democratic resilience, the accession process is beginning to tilt more toward supporting the civic sphere as a key bulwark against both Russian intrusion and autocracy.16 Compared to previous rounds of enlargement, there is more focus emerging around an EU accession process that tackles patronage and is more oriented toward popular empowerment and engagement.17 The EU has increased support to CSOs, including for legal costs and protection against regime repression. A handful of governments, plus donors such as the European Endowment for Democracy and the Prague Civil Society Centre, have offered new forms of flexible funding and reached out to support informal civic actors. EU member states such as the Czech Republic and Estonia have allowed Georgian CSOs to register there to circumvent the "foreign agents" law. The international community provided especially significant funding for civil society's election-monitoring initiatives, helping to make the 2024 elections so extensively observed. After the elections, the EU promised to reallocate 100 million euros of its frozen aid to CSOs instead. Sweden halted all funding to the GD government and diverted 25 million euros of aid to critical civil society initiatives in Georgia. [End Page 131]

The possibility of an EU future is the core driver of social mobilization against autocratization in Georgia. As one CSO leader said to us: "If they backtrack on EU integration, there could be revolution." And indeed, it was GD's suspension of accession talks that triggered the intense protests near the end of 2024. Moreover, the EU's wider democracy toolbox is now larger and has more bite than when the last round of enlargement took place, as seen recently with legal and financial measures against Hungary and Poland. The aim, moreover, has been to extend this to candidate states before they fully join the Union.

The EU influence still suffers limitations. CSOs complained to us that the EU is still too ready to make deals with GD and prior to the elections had been pushing them too hard to retain cooperation with the government in order to prepare for accession. The EU remains wary of fully and tangibly supporting protest movements. Yet as the accession process takes on a more political ethos, the EU dimension may more decisively prompt democratic resilience. In the geopolitical context of the 2020s, the societal level of pre-accession support becomes more important and more valuable relative to slow-moving technocratic-institutional change.

Beyond Protest

Georgia has seen some of recent times' most dramatic popular revolts against autocratization. The protesters' verve and tenacity, plus Georgia's significance as a geopolitical swing state, imbue these events with high importance. Analytical and comparative study of Georgian democratic resilience sheds light on both its potency and its limits. Reflection on the crisis in Georgia may help us better to understand why some episodes of autocratization lead to stable autocracies while others trigger robust democratic resilience.

The Georgian case shows that in real time, autocratization and democratic resilience can messily overlap even if the latter is gradually gaining force. Resilience is nonlinear; ways of thinking about it—and about its antithesis, autocratization—need to become less linear too. The evolution of Georgia's crisis shows not just that autocratic moves are contested but that these moves themselves create the conditions for sharper forms of contestation.

In Georgia, civil society and citizens overshadow formal institutions and political parties when it comes to resisting autocracy. Accounts of democratic resilience often focus on institutional guardrails, but in Georgia these have fallen short; society is the key bulwark against full autocracy. Attacks on civil society have been a leading vehicle of autocratization, with societal mobilization taking the lead in the response. The lessons here are that the civic dimension of resilience needs to be more systematically conceptualized, and that we need to [End Page 132] better understand how autocratization and democratic resilience shape each other.

The government's falsification of the October 2024 elections and political clampdown have set off another wave of mobilization. While the elections were effectively stolen, this fraud was robustly contested. Whatever the short-term outcome of the country's crisis, there are deep-seated dynamics unfolding beneath the current drama. Societal and institutional forms of resilience seem to be coalescing; the EU-accession process may be where the strands fuse definitively. Society and institutions are not as interlocked on behalf of democratic resilience as they are in Brazil or Poland, which is why resilience in Georgia has not had the kind of impact seen in those cases. Civic resistance has yet to become full-spectrum resilience displayed by the whole political system. Reformist dynamics and strategies still need to shift at multiple levels—protests, civil society, political parties, EU policy—if this turbocharged resilience is to reverse autocratization.

Elene Panchulidze

Elene Panchulidze is research coordinator at the European Partnership for Democracy.

Richard Youngs

Richard Youngs is a senior fellow in the Conflict, Democracy, and Governance Program at Carnegie Europe and professor at the University of Warwick.

NOTES

1. Grzegorz Ekiert and Noah Dasanaike, "The Return of Dictatorship," Journal of Democracy 35 (October 2024):177–91.

2. Wolfgang Merkel and Anna Lührmann, "Resilience of Democracies: Responses to Illiberal and Authoritarian Challenges," Democratization 28 (July 2021): 869–84.

3. Vanessa A. Boese et al., "How Democracies Prevail: Democratic Resilience as a Two-Stage Process," Democratization 28 (July 2021): 885–907.

4. Merkel and Lührmann, "Resilience of Democracies."

5. Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, "Democracy's Surprising Resilience," Journal of Democracy 34 (October 2023): 5–20; Licia Cianetti, Marie-Eve Desrosiers, and Nic Cheeseman, "Pathways of Autocratization and Their Consequences: Understanding the State-as-Context," paper presented at the American Political Science Association annual meeting, Philadelphia, 2024.

6. Marina Nord, et al., "When Autocratization Is Reversed: Episodes of Democratic Turnarounds Since 1900," V-Dem Institute, 30 January 2024, https://v-dem.net/media/publications/wp_147_yvOYnKU.pdf.

7. Gabriel Gavin, "Georgia Goes 'North Korea' with Bombshell Plan to Ban Main Opposition Parties," Politico Europe, 23 August 2024, www.politico.eu/article/georgiaopposition-ban-georgian-dream-party-election-eu-enlargement-irakli-kobakhidze.

8. Ghia Nodia, "Why Georgia Has Erupted in Protest," Journal of Democracy, May 2024, www.journalofdemocracy.org/online-exclusive/why-georgia-has-erupted-in-protest.

9. "CRRC Caucasus Barometer 2024 Survey Results for Georgia", Civil Georgia, 22 July 2024, https://civil.ge/archives/617080; Tamar Khoshtaria, "Results of the 2008–2024 Caucasus Barometer surveys," https://shorturl.at/4UKQw.

10. "Breaking: President Zurabishvili Rejects Election Results," Civil Georgia, 27 October 2024, https://civil.ge/archives/631657.

11. Sarah Repucci, "The Freedom House Survey for 2019: The Leaderless Struggle for Democracy," Journal of Democracy 31 (April 2020): 137–51; Erica Chenoweth, "The Future of Nonviolent Resistance," Journal of Democracy 31 (July 2020): 69–84. On Georgia's region and neighbors, see Eleanor Knott, "Perpetually 'Partly Free': Lessons from Post-Soviet Hybrid Regimes on Backsliding in Central and Eastern Europe," East European Politics 34, no. 3 (2018): 355–76.

12. Thomas Carothers and Benjamin Feldman, "Understanding and Supporting Democratic Bright Spots," Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 27 March 2023, https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2023/03/understanding-and-supporting-democratic-bright-spots?lang=en.

13. Stephen Jones, "Perspectives: Georgia on the Brink," Eurasianet, 3 June 2024, https://eurasianet.org/perspectives-georgia-on-the-brink.

14. Nic Cheeseman and Susan Dodsworth, "Defending Civic Space: When Are Campaigns Against Repressive Laws Successful?" Journal of Development Studies 59, no. 5 (2023): 619–36.

15. Kornely Kakachia, Bidzina Lebanidze, and Shota Kakabadze, "Transactional Hedging versus Value-Based Hedging: How Small Frontline States Balance Between European Integration and Russian Influence," European Security 33, no. 4 (2024): 594–614.

16. Elene Panchulidze and Richard Youngs, "Beyond the Copenhagen Criteria: Rethinking the Political Conditions of EU Accession," Carnegie Europe, 5 June 2024, https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2024/06/rethinking-eu-accession-criteria?lang=en&center=europe.

17. Laszlo Bruszt and Erik Jones, "Ukraine's Perilous Path to EU Membership," Foreign Affairs, 30 May 2024, www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/ukraines-perilous-path-eumembership.

Share