Role conceptions, crises, and Georgia’s foreign policy

Abstract

This article explores the scope conditions of national role conceptions as reference points for foreign policy decision making during crises. It aims to contribute to a refined perspective of the agency of new states undergoing socialization processes in relations with significant others. Drawing on a primary material consisting of interviews with Georgian and US officials, the article analyzes the significance of Georgia’s role conceptions in the country’s relations with the USA in relation to two major crises: the 2007 riots in Tbilisi and the 2008 war with Russia. The article posits that crises provide situational circumstances where the requirements of appropriate behavior associated with role expectations may enter into conflict with the demands of the immediate situation. In order to resolve ensuing role conflicts, actors face the need to both rationalize role expectations, and to compensate for departures from them. In turn, these strategies relate to the possibility for change and stability in role conceptions, and by extension their enactment in foreign policy. The analysis of the Georgian government’s management of the two crises demonstrates actions that implied both rationalization and compensation, aiming to retain the credibility of its existing role conceptions in the eyes of its US counterparts.

From failing state to strategic partner: analyzing US and NATO political elite images of Georgia and policy implications from 1991 to 2020

“…This paper, therefore, by no means refutes the conventional accounts mentioned above, but rather, by approaching US/NATO engagement in Georgia from an individual-level perspective, tries to examine elite images of Georgia and see which of the abovementioned arguments have been closest to the mark. An individual-level approach is not new in foreign policy analysis (Hudson 2005;Cooley andMitchell 2009, 2010;Cooley and Nexon 2016;Nilsson 2019;McFaul 2020); previous studies have already argued that there are actors "with disproportionate power to affect national and supranational political outcomes on a continuing basis" (Best and Higley 2018, 3), who create, modify, and influence structures (Jervis 2017, 109;Walker, Malici, and Schafer 2011). As Jervis (1976, 28) mentions, "it is often impossible to explain crucial decision and policies without reference to the decision makers' beliefs about the world and their image of others.…”

Russia’s Failure as a Benign Hegemon: The Domination of Hobbesian Culture in the 2008 Russo-Georgian War

“…This was evident in Georgia's efforts to approach NATO, EU, and the U.S. (Stent, 2014). Russia was blamed for the emergence of de facto independent territories, namely Abkhazia and South Ossetia (Nilsson, 2019).…”