Georgia in-between: religion in public schools

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a Georgian village and supplemented by a range of interviews and observations from different parts of Georgia, this paper explores the creative presence of religion in public schools. In 2005 and in line with the strong secularization and modernization discourse, the Georgian parliament passed a new law on education, restricting the teaching of religion in public schools and separating religious organizations and public schools; nevertheless, mainstream Orthodox Christianity is widely practiced in schools. The paper aims to show how Georgians use religious spaces in secular institutions to practice their identity, to perform being “true Georgians.” At the same time, they are adopting a strong secularization and modernization discourse. By doing so they create a new space, a third space, marked by in-betweenness. The study uses the theoretical lens of Thirdspace for analyzing the hybridity, the in-betweenness of practices and attitudes inherent for politics, religion, and everyday life of Georgians.     

Cherry Picking EU Conditionality: Selective Compliance in Georgia’s Hybrid Regime

This article investigates the rationale behind compliance and non-compliance with EU conditionality in Georgia’s hybrid regime. Following the literature on competitive authoritarianism, it argues that the survival strategies of hybrid regime incumbents compel them to dodge conditionality in those policy areas that are crucial for maintaining the uneven political playing field. On the other hand, specific self-preservation tactics dictate that they should embrace neighbourhood Europeanisation in policy domains capable of generating votes. Taken together, these hypotheses alert us to the possibility that hybrid regime governments in the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) countries are cherry picking conditionality.     

Hitting the saturation point: unpacking the politics of bureaucratic reforms in hybrid regimes

How do the survival incentives facing incumbents in hybrid regimes affect the engineering of bureaucratic reforms? This article tackles this question by departing from the literature on competitive authoritarianism and with the help of detailed empirical evidence from Georgia’s public administration reforms (2004–2012). It first argues that in order to preserve their hold on power, dominant parties have to tilt the political playing field, while still upholding popular support. I posit that this dual incentive structure leads the incumbents to promote efficiency of public service, but to also curb these policies at a point that would jeopardize their ability to use administrative resources for partisan ends. Consequently, bureaucratic reforms reach a saturation point, beyond which no more reforms can be endured.     

How Soviet is the Religious Revival in Georgia: Tactics in Everyday Religiosity*

This article explores everyday religiosity in post-Soviet Georgia based on multi-sited fieldwork and applying a genealogical approach. It looks at the use of tactics in negotiations between priests and believers. The article sees negotiations, prevalent in domestic religiosity and embodied practices, as a continuation of everyday Soviet tactics, particularly informal networks (Blat) and moonlighting (Khaltura). To understand how negotiations lead to greater control and an increase in religiosity, the article explores important features of the Georgian Orthodox Church and its specific development. The article concludes that tactics in this specific context strengthen the more powerful and reproduce dependency.     

Genetic polymorphisms at four STR loci from the HLA region in a Venezuelan population

POPULATIONS: Whole blood samples from 74 unrelated healthy individuals were collected. The donors' sample included Venezuelan mestizos from various regions of the country, but mostly from the resident population of Caracas City. A Venezuelan mestizo is the offspring of a mating between a native Venezuelan and a person born in Europe, mainly in Spain.