This article draws upon poststructuralist and postcolonial theories to examine the European Union’s (EU’s) policies of human rights promotion in the South Caucasus – notably, the EU’s engagement with local human rights activists and organisations in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. Contrary to most literature, which has been concerned with policy (in)effectiveness, this article is interested in problematising the discursive foundations of this EU-civil society ‘partnership’ in the realm of human rights promotion, as well as in retrieving the agency of actors who are ‘at the receiving end’ of EU policies. It is argued that the discursive construction of ‘civil’ society as a ‘good-Other’ of the EU-Self serves as a means to depoliticise the EU’s interventions, aiming at the approximation of ‘transitioning’ countries to the EU’s human rights standards. Although the hegemonic relation requires subaltern actors to perform the ‘civil’ society identity, processes of hybridisation and subversion arise as external interventions interact with local realities and meanings. Building on in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations, the article shows how the hegemonic identity of ‘civil’ society is negotiated by South Caucasus ‘not-quite-civil’ actors striving for local legitimacy, financial survival or ownership of their human rights work.

This article examines the interplay between EU interventions fostering LGBT+ rights inGeorgia, and the visibility-raising strategies of local queer activists. The growing antagonism between the EU and Russia over their 'shared neighbourhood' crystallizes the idea of a valuebased divide between the West/EUrope and the East/Russia on LGBT+ issues -with Georgia occupying a liminal position therein. The paper puts forward the concept of geopoliticization to unpack how the discursive construction of LGBT+ equality as a geopolitical issue shapes Georgian queer activists' visibility strategies, and to interrogate the outcomes these processes produce.

This article studies collective action and political mobilisation of Georgian internally displaced persons (IDPs). It focuses on IDPs’ responses to a controversial housing policy implemented as of 2010 by the Georgian government, which mandated resettlement of IDPs from collective centres to private accommodations. Building on relative deprivation theories, the article pinpoints and analyses four types of responses shown by IDPs in the aftermath of resettlement. Finally, it provides an assessment of the obstacles faced by IDPs’ in their collective and political action, and recommendations for policy developments. This exploratory study is based on qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews conducted in Tbilisi among IDPs from Abkhazia.

No abstract

No abstract