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Cornell examines the political developments in Georgia as of 2022. He charts how a blend of personalism and opposition weakness has impeded anticipated progress toward democratic consolidation in Georgia since the August 2008 war. The centralization that began under Mikheil Saakashvili in order to \"push reforms through recalcitrant institutions\" only intensified under Bidzina Ivanishvili, who leveraged his personal fortune to defeat Saakashvili. The years since have seen the spread of clientelistic practices that have jeopardized previous gains, while the government's continued pronouncements of a commitment to Euro-Atlanticism have been contradicted by efforts to \"normalize\" relations with Russia. Indeed, Georgia has seen such backsliding on key democratic indicators that it was not granted EU candidate status alongside Ukraine and Moldova in the summer of 2022, despite having long been seen as the frontrunner for this status.

Most studies of technocratic populism have focused on democracies under stress (e.g., Italy, Czech Republic). This article builds on and extends these studies by analyzing a hybrid regime—post-Soviet Georgia—and argues that technocratic populism in this context is utilized as a façade to cover authoritarian and oligarchic tendencies, while suspending (or reversing) democratization efforts. The state apparatus is weaponized against current and potential political opponents. Ideology is irrelevant, loyalty is key, and passivity is encouraged. The government aims to chip away at institutional checks and balances, and to demobilize the public by undermining confidence in the country’s representative institutions while increasing dependence on experienced personalities, the ‘can do experts.’ The result is most often a stable partial-reform equilibrium. We illustrate this argument with evidence from Georgia, where Bidzina Ivanishvili, the richest man in the country, came to power in 2012 and, despite not holding any official position in the government since 2013, has run the state as a firm.

This article analyzes the shaping and transformation of the post-Soviet security thinking of Georgia and Ukraine in the context of the post-Soviet Russian foreign policy in the near abroad, often designated as a legitimate sphere of Russian influence, and the competition between Russia and the EU and the US in the region. After the Rose Revolution of Georgia and the Orange Revolution of Ukraine, these two countries' independent/pro-Western orientation became the main issues securitized by the Russian Federation. Correspondingly, the preservation of territorial integrity became the top security issue for Georgia (since the early 1990s), and it became so for Ukraine after the Crimean occupation (March 2014) and the renewed armed hostilities across the entirety of Ukraine since February 2022. The changes in the internal politics of these countries were transposed into the international competition between Russia and the EU/US, expressed through the clash of \"Sovereign Democracy\" and \"Color Revolution\" paradigms for the future of post-Soviet states in the 2010s and transformed into active military measures in Ukraine since 2020s and through the so-called creeping annexation of Georgia since 2010s. Practically, these are the tools of maintaining the Russian influence on the one hand and opposing the Western values and power influence, supported firstly by the European Neighborhood Policy and the Eastern Partnership projects and secondly by granting candidate status to Ukraine in 2022. Russia's military actions against Georgia (2008) and Ukraine (2014-2023), a response to the soft power applied by the West, aimed at the creation of buffer zones in the shape of \"frozen conflicts,\" which could be used as indirect leverage in the hands of the Russian Federation to block the Western aspirations of Georgia and Ukraine.