CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Gegeshidze, Shako |
|---|---|
| Title | Youth Movements in Georgia: Civic Agency and Democratic Accountability in a Post-Soviet Context |
| Summary | Georgia’s 2020-2024 cycle of democratic backsliding triggered a new wave of youth-led contention. This thesis traces how young activists confronted the “foreign agents” bills (2023-2024), contested the disputed 2024 parliamentary election, and carried forward campaigns on human rights, media freedom and judicial independence. Combining document and policy analysis, multi-platform media monitoring, and semi-structured interviews with journalists, grassroots organizers and opposition strategists, it applies process tracing to map event sequences and thematic coding to detect recurrent frames and tactical adaptation. A comparative lens situates Georgian mobilization alongside Serbia’s Otpor! and Ukraine’s Euromaidan, isolating common repertoires - non-violent disruption, decentralized networks and symbolic politics, while showing how regime type and external leverage condition outcomes. Findings reveal that, although barred from formal decision-making, Georgian youth movements shift national agendas by normalizing street protest, reframing European integration as a civic identity and generating international pressure that constrains state action. Their discursive and infrastructural innovations carve out autonomous civic space inside a hybrid regime, illustrating how norm entrepreneurship (Keck & Sikkink 1998) and networked mobilization (Tufekci 2017; McAdam, Tarrow & Tilly 2001) can blunt democratic erosion even without immediate legislative wins. By foregrounding generational agency, the study refines theories of social movements and post-Soviet democratization, emphasizing protest influence as an iterative process of agenda-setting, discourse production and reputational leverage. The conclusions speak to scholars and practitioners seeking to bolster democratic accountability in Georgia and comparable semi-authoritarian settings. |
| Supervisor | Cartwright, Andrew |
| Department | Public Policy MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/gegeshidze_shako.pdf |
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