The building of a new Georgian nation: il/legality in a - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

The building of a new Georgian nation: il/legality in a post-revolutionary country

• Dr. Lili Di Puppo

Assistant Professor of Sociology Higher School of Economics – National Research University, Moscow

Focus of the paper

The “paradox of post-revolutionary Georgia”:

• Understand how the project of building a

Western, modernised Georgia has engendered certain illegal practices

• Field research conducted in 2007 and 2008

and November 2012: Polarisation in the assessments of Georgia's reforms: from “success story” to “authoritarian tendencies” Attention to the building of narratives on Georgia

Nation- “building” in Georgia

Nation- “building” in Georgia

Nation- “building” in Georgia

“Light” and “darkness” in Georgia

The act of lighting certain buildings as manifestation of power as the ability “to switch

• n and off and thereby illuminate one building

rather than another, as a decision on what should be seen and what should be kept in the shadows.” (Demant Frederiksen 2013) Reference to binary oppositions in the metaphor

• f “light” and “darkness”:
• “future” and “past”
• “order” and “chaos”
• “legality” and “illegality” (corruption)

“Light” and “darkness” in Georgia

Building of two Georgias: the new, modern Georgia opposed to the old Soviet Georgia and post-Soviet Georgia of the 1990s. Separation between the state as legal-rational domain and the dark criminal underworld What is being hidden behind the official representation of “darkness”?

Blurred boundaries under Shevardnadze

The new Georgian nation born

• ut of the chaos (Shatirishvili

2009)

Saint George statue on Tbilisi Freedom Square

The police reform in Georgia

Literature on corruption and il/legality (Nuijten and Anders 2007, Heyman and Smart 1999, Rigi 2013)

• “hidden continuities” between domains that are

represented as antynomic (f.ex. corruption and law); these domains are rather mutually constitutive

• The division between “public” and “private” and

“legality” and “illegality” on a conceptual level correspond to state thought categories (Bourdieu 1994), elements of a self- representation of the state

The police reform in Georgia

Focus on the punitive and coercive arm of the state as a privileged means to reassert state authority and sovereignty (Wacquant 2009) Two central dimensions of the punitive state 1) The creation of social boundaries, categories and types 2) The notion of spectacle, the theatricalization

• f penality

Nation-building: the bricks

In a speech on July 2004, Mikheil Saakashvili tells new graduates of the police academy: “Georgia should be built brick by brick and you are one of the most important bricks of this building.” (Krunic and Siradze 2005) New model of Georgianness: the new, young policeman as opposed to the old, corrupt policeman and the thief-in-law

The new policeman

The new policeman

The old policeman

The ethical other

Jobard (2012) on the role played by the police in its day-to-day activities in defining the enemy in society understood as the “ethical other” who does not partake to the shared values of the community. Policing exerts the function of controlling the undisciplined and in doing this, “it turns an indistinct assemblage into a political community, i.e. a polity.” (Jobard 2012) The outlaw serves to consolidate an idea of the nation “as a moral community guaranteed by the state” (Comaroffs 2004)

Creation of social boundaries

Creation of boundaries and new social domains. A space of marginality and deviance and a new realm of outsiders is being formed where those who have not been able to catch the “train of modernisation” become confined. Mikheil Saakashvili in reference to the opposition in 2007: “They want to catch the train which has already departed and which is already so far away that it is even impossible to catch it even with a Formula 1 car.”

Switching the light on and off

The light is switched on in the public space where the new, modern Georgia becomes a reality through the disappearance of traces of crime and corruption from the public view The light is switched off in the dark space of the prison which becomes extended and where those who do not belong to a new Georgia become confined. They are denied an existence in this new Georgia and disappear from the public view.

Soso Topuridze

Two faces of the Georgian police

The patrol police as the acceptable public face of the police institution in Georgia directed at an international and domestic audience The Constitutional Security Department (CSD) as a more ambiguous institution acting in different realms “light” (television) and “dark” space (prison), directed at a domestic audience

Soso Topuridze

http://1tv.ge/news-view/10583?lang=en 00:48

The spectacle of policing in Georgia

Identifiable figures Permanent battle of the law-enforcement domain against the criminal underworld or the corrupt elements in society “Everywhere the law-and-order guignol has become a core civic theatre onto whose stage elected officials prance to dramatize moral norms and display their professed capacity for decisive action, thereby reaffirming the political relevance of Leviathan at the very moment when they organize its powerlessness with regard to the market.” (Wacquant 2009)

The spectacle of policing in Georgia

Comaroffs on post-apartheid South Africa: “The drama that is so integral to policing the post-colony is evidence of a desire to condense disperse power in order to make it visible, tangible, accountable, effective.” (Comaroffs 2004)

Extension of the dark space of the prison

Jobard (2012) on the notion of “legal lawlessness” or the ability to legally infringe on the shared law as a characteristic of the police institution. A large part of the population become confined to the space of the prison and subject to certain extra-legal practices References to the notion of a state of exception and to the need to protect the country's national security in the government's discourse. This discourse justifies the recourse to illegal practices such as abuses on prisoners

Conclusion

Binary oppositions are dramatised in spaces that receive the most light (street-level, virtual spaces of television and governance rankings), while the “dark space” of prison reveals more fluidity between different domains (notions of “legal lawlessness” and “state of exception” apply in this space) Georgia as an example of the neoliberal state rather than the transition state? Combination of the minimal state and the remasculinization of the state (Wacquant) through the strengthening of its punitive arm

TI 2010, Global Corruption Barometer, response to question: “To what extent do you perceive the police to be affected by corruption?”

Ease of Doing Business, Ranking 2010