Authors

Mariam Shalvashvili¹;  ¹ Ilia State University, Georgia

Discussion

The article investigates the political turmoil between the Kist minority community and the Georgian state against the historical context of larger geopolitical processes unfolding since the turn of the millennium such as the second Chechnya war, 9/11, and the wars in Syria and Ukraine. Kists, a predominantly Muslim minority of Georgia, belong to the same ethnicity as Chechens, Ingush and Bats/Batsbi, and they reside primarily in the Pankisi gorge, a peripheral zone in the northern part of Georgia. In the aftermath of the aforementioned geopolitical events, both Kists and Pankisi Gorge have come to be depicted as 'dangerous', 'uncivilized', and 'radical’, both by the international media and within the Georgian nationalist imagination. This understanding has shaped the Georgian state's policies toward the Kists– everyday state surveillance, police intimidation practices, violent special operations, rigorous checks at Georgian borders, etc. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, critical discourse analysis, qualitative interviews and participant observation, this article interprets how these depictions and discrimination of Kists and Pankisi Gorge have become dominant and ubiquitous. It illustrates the various everyday strategies and novel forms of agency utilized by the Kists to ‘counter-narrate’ the state and invert/subvert these marginalizing discourses and practices. It also delves into their myriad means of navigating through or outright escaping from both the social and spatial terrains of marginality. In addition, the paper recounts the aftermath of the Georgian state's politics on both the social and physical landscape of Pankisi. Finally, the article concludes by analyzing these everyday practices in the Pankisi Gorge as the politics of citizenship in the margins of the Georgian state.