Articles

The purpose of this essay is to discuss the four formal and informal governments of post-Soviet Georgia, which were led by Zviad Gamsakhurdia, Eduard Shevardnadze, Mikheil Saakashvili, and Bidzina Ivanishvili, through the prism of vertical social contracts. 

This essay describes a journey in time. We ‘hike’ from the aftermath of the Velvet Revolution to the 2021 election. The hike covers selected parts of the IT landscape, especially its role as a driver for economic transformation and social change.

Informality is a form of solidarity economy and post-pandemic survival mode for the most economically active population of Azerbaijan. Women, consisting 62% of the informal workers, should be situated in the center of conversations on reproduction, labor rights, social protection and welfare support during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This article points out how the various consolidated apparatuses render feminism and feminists the most visible other by utilizing different othering techniques such as criminalization and securitization. What is more, it depicts how feminism and women's issues started to get politicized, shifting from the "social/safe" to the "political/dangerous" space on a discursive level.  

"There is a house in Baku where cis and trans women live together and support each other. They also don't allow any transphobic people or anyone who could potentially be a threat to move in," said a friend to me in a conversation that one usually has when you haven't seen each other in months and want to share the world over a cup of tea. 

The nanny profession can be described in many ways:  informal work, care work, and domestic work. Globally, women perform these jobs. Child care, like many jobs that women do, never acquired professional recognition and remains disrespected and degraded to this day.  

There is a general agreement among citizens of Georgia that the protection of the environment is a matter of crucial importance. While the environmental sustainability is essential for 98% of the population, the environment-oriented policy has not become a priority for the government.

The Georgian judiciary has been in the process of ongoing reform since Georgia gained its independence. However, to this day, we have not created judicial institutions that will resist internal and external influences. We could not make a system free from internal corporate, financial, or party interests.

Discussions around the most popular topics in Georgia are often submerged in doubts and mistrust. Many social groups feel that everything is not what it seems at first glance, the explanation of events is often misleading, and there are alternative understandings of what is going on that are rarely revealed and are kept secret.

While visiting Kutaisi Airport, the question came to my mind how would it be possible to study this area through ethnography lenses. Airports are somewhat new places of study, and I have not heard of academic research in this regard.