Violent Georgia

This book intends to show that the violent disintegration of the Soviet Union, characteristic for the South Caucasus region and most prominently Georgia, cannot be fully explained solely by an investigation of the ethnopolitical and national uprisings which were stimulated by the political changes of the Perestroika period. Instead, it argues that a rigorous analysis of the late 1980s/early 1990s violent transitions has to be linked with a longer-term perspective focusing on the function and development of the Soviet developmentalist state. This perspective tends to view the Soviet system as an alternative to the Western capitalist system and aims towards an understanding the socio-economic processes which determined the dynamics of the system. In this sense, violent mobilizations in Georgia resulted from the processes that were determined by the function and decline of the Soviet developmentalist state. While accepting the dynamics of ethnopolitical mobilization, this monograph addresses the issue of which socio-economic processes bred those mobilizations.