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Caucasus Survey
ISSN: 2376-1199 (Print) 2376-1202 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcau20
Borderization theatre: geopolitical
entrepreneurship on the South Ossetia boundary
line, 2008–2018
Gerard Toal (Gearóid Ó Tuathail) & Gela Merabishvili
To cite this article: Gerard Toal (Gearóid Ó Tuathail) & Gela Merabishvili (2019): Borderization
theatre: geopolitical entrepreneurship on the South Ossetia boundary line, 2008–2018, Caucasus
Survey, DOI: 10.1080/23761199.2019.1565192
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/23761199.2019.1565192
Published online: 24 Jan 2019.
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Borderization theatre: geopolitical entrepreneurship on the
South Ossetia boundary line, 2008–2018
Gerard Toal (Gearóid Ó Tuathail) and Gela Merabishvili
School of Public and International Affairs, Virginia Tech, Alexandria, VA, USA
ABSTRACT
Borderization refers to the construction of physical barriers to
transform a territorial ceasefire line into an international border.
The term was used first by European Union officials to refer to the
administrative boundary line between Georgia and de facto state
of South Ossetia. The article analyses how physical border
construction in this area became a theatre of symbolic
(geo)political gamesmanship, a background prop for political
competition between Georgian domestic parties and a pilgrimage
site for visualizing Georgia’s victimhood to international
audiences. Presenting borderization as evidence of domestic
irresoluteness or geopolitical aggression is a rhetorical gambit that
may or may not work. Those most associated with it in Georgian
domestic politics lost power. Internationally, though, borderization
is now part of standard litanies of Russian geopolitical aggression,
cited even by politicians who support border walls. The relative
success of Georgia’s borderization theatre complexifies hegemonic
socialization arguments for it reveals the capacity of small states
to socialize hegemonic states into sharing their tropes of
victimhood and vulnerability.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 25 May 2018
Accepted 2 January 2019
KEYWORDS
Borderization; barbed wire
fence; South Ossetia; Georgia;
Russia; symbolic politics;
affective geopolitics;
victimhood
Introduction
[In Georgian] “Data papa [grandpa], hello! We have guests here”.
“Who cares about guests? I really can’t go on like this anymore, son. I can’t do it anymore”.
1
A young man, and a visiting diplomat, address an old man across barbed wire. The old
man, Data Vanishvili, is an ethnic Georgian farmer and an unlikely interlocutor of diplo-
mats. He lives in the village of Khurvaleti along what Georgians term an “occupation line”
[saokupatsio khazi] or, more dryly, an “administrative boundary line”(ABL). But to the
South Ossetian Republic where Vanishvili now finds himself, the barbed wire demarcates
an international border. Vanishvili’s words are ambivalent. Ostensibly, they are a com-
plaint about the barrier that runs through his garden, fields and village. But his disinterest
in guests could also be the fatigued reaction of an ordinary farmer from Khurvaleti who
inadvertently personifies Georgia’s victimization.
Since the beginning of the material demarcation of a border around South Ossetia,
Vanishvili’s backyard has become a must-see location on curated visits for international
© 2019 International Association for the Study of the Caucasus
CONTACT Gerard Toal (Gearóid Ó Tuathail) toalg@vt.edu
CAUCASUS SURVEY
https://doi.org/10.1080/23761199.2019.1565192
officials visiting Georgia, and a handshake with Vanishvili across barbed wire one of many
irresistible photographic opportunities for sharing on social media. Among the foreign
dignitaries who have met and shook hands with him in the past five years are two Estonian
Foreign Ministers, Keit Pentus-Rosimannus (19 December 2014) and Sven Mikser (24
April 2017), Estonian President Kersti Kaljulaid (2 November 2017), Ukraine’s President
Petro Poroshenko (19 July 2017), the Slovakian President Andrej Kiska (31 May 2016),
Latvian President Raimonds Vejonis (29 March 2017), a trio of US Senators John
McCain, Lindsey Graham and Amy Klobuchar (2 January 2017), NATO Supreme
Allied Commander Europe General Philip Breedlove (26 March 2016) and US Army
Europe’s Commanding General Ben Hodges (8 September 2016). This time it is a
member of the European Parliament, with a film maker on hand to record the scene as
part of a documentary on Vanishvili and the disputed border.
Vanishvili features regularly in international and national media stories about what
most name as borderization, the construction of physical barriers to transform a
conflict line into an international border. The typical story goes like this: one evening
Data Vanishvili went to bed in Georgia and awoke in South Ossetia, his garden divided
by a newly erected barbed wire fence (Ellena 2013; North 2015;CNN2017). Vanishvili’s
backyard is then placed in the wider context of Russian actions. The Guardian, for
example, framed his story thus: “Vanishvili is a victim of what appears to be a slow-
motion Russian plan to absorb the region for good, while covertly seizing more Georgian
territory with its self-declared border fence”(North 2015). The story is often scaled up
further, beyond Georgia to Ukraine, and further still into a standoffbetween the West
and a revisionist Russia. From the garden of a single farmer in the South Caucasus a
New Cold War is conjured and extrapolated across the European continent and
beyond. Vanishvili, in short, is a character in an emergent melodramatic narrative
about international relations after the twenty-five-year Cold Peace from 1989–2014
(Sakwa 2017). Although this New Cold War drama resonates with many in the Euro-
Atlantic world, it is hardly alone as a drama about borders in this sphere. Indeed, in
certain respects, it is a drama that is at odds with prevailing sentiment in favour of
border walls.
Since the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the number of new border walls across the
globe has risen from 15 to nearly 70 (Vallet 2014). Populist politics has enjoyed a resur-
gence across Europe and the United States propelled by fears of immigration and slogans
declaring the need to “take control of our borders”. Borders walls are powerful symbolic
objects in contemporary political gamesmanship. Well before the latest populist surge,
Wendy Brown argued that new border walls “often function theatrically, projecting
power and efficaciousness that they do not and cannot actually exercise …” (Brown
2010, 15). For her, border walls were more symbolic than material forces, “theatricalized
and spectacularized performances of sovereign power at aspirational or actual national
borders”(Brown 2010, 26). More recently Shannon Mattern described border walls as
“a pre-linguistic proclamation of power and control, a tyrannical speech act in concrete.
They entice us to misrecognize their height and strength as an index of sovereignty,
safety, certainty”(Mattern 2018). Donald Trump ignited his presidential campaign in
June 2015 by declaring that Mexico was sending criminals, drug-dealers and rapists to
the United States. He followed this up with a high-profile visit to Laredo Texas on the
US Mexican border and with calls to construct a high border wall between the two
2G. TOAL (GEARÓID Ó TUATHAIL) AND G. MERABISHVILI
countries (Green 2017). The border served as a prop for Trump’s populist xenophobia and
it remains a site of symbolic politics for him and many other xenophobic politicians across
the globe (Jones 2012).
Borders are sites of symbolic politics for small states too. Curated visits for politicians
from powerful countries to emblematic sites are an important means by which small states
can advance their interests through guided localized geopolitical socialization. This can be
seen as the other side of hegemonic socialization, namely the ways powerful states bind
small ones to themselves not only by material incentives but also by socialization into
shared norms and geopolitical storylines (Ikenberry and Kupchan 1990). Such visits are
also a “rite of passage”for politicians aspiring to become authoritative foreign policy
voices within their own political contexts. These visits help international political guests
not only see the world as the host state presents it but also feel its affective geopolitical
culture. Visits by US Congressional delegations to Israel, for example, often feature a heli-
copter ride over the state to emphasize its “vulnerable geography”. There is also usually a
ground-level visit to threatened borders. In January 2006, for example, Barack Obama
visited the country and was taken to the border town of Kiryat Shmona and to a house
recently hit by a Katyusha rocket fired by Hezbollah. Recounting the visit in a speech
to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference a year later, Obama
assured his audience that it was “an experience that I keep close to my heart”(Abunimah
2007; Toal 2009).
Drawing upon Brown’s argument about border walls as theatrical stages for symbolic
politics, Bourdieu’s arguments about social fields characterized by symbolic capital
accumulation strategies, and critical geopolitical literature on affective geopolitics, this
paper examines the ways in which border fence construction in South Ossetia has stimu-
lated (geo)political entrepreneurship in Georgian domestic and international political
fields (Bourdieu 1986; Brown 2010; Toal 2017). The South Ossetia case is interesting
because, contrary to populist discourse, border barrier construction is the problem not
the solution (Boyle 2016b; Kakachia 2018). Still, the visible material image of the
border is a compelling stage for symbolic political performances. These performances
have multiple audiences and work across different political fields. Visits to Data Vanishvili
by various officials and diplomats with choreographed interactions and photographs
connect the personalistic and local scales of borderization to national and transnational
scales. Georgia gets to display its victimization to visiting diplomats and analysts while
they get to display their international experience and solidarities to their own international
and domestic audiences. Curated visits, however, are only one type of border theatre.
Other performances include political rallies, protests and demonstrations. The paper
differentiates between a domestic Georgian political field and an international political
field, with the Georgian language the medium of the former, and English the predominant
medium of the latter. In practice, these fields overlap and co-exist. Outside the scope of the
paper is the question of what is driving the process of borderization from a Russian and
South Ossetian Republic perspective. Outside it too are questions of international law
(whether the border is legal or illegal, just or unjust), and how the new barrier is
affecting border communities (see International Crisis Group 2018; Otruba 2018). That
borders are theatrical spaces for symbolic politics is not to imply that they are not real,
material and oppressive to many locals. Complex spatialities create and maintain them
(Jones et al. 2017).
CAUCASUS SURVEY 3
The sources for the paper are varied. We utilize various official sources for statements
on agreements as well as framing situation descriptions. To chronicle the various perform-
ances, we draw upon the archives of Georgian newspapers over the past decade, and select
international media publications. These feature news reporting from the border, covering
such events as protests, visits by politicians and diplomats, and various reactions to new
instances of borderization. We also utilize social media sources. These are Twitter posts
made by Georgian and foreign officials and diplomats, depicting their visits to the
border barrier. Finally, we conducted a series of background interviews with Georgian
government officials on the borderization issue.
The paper has three major sections. Section one provides a brief history of the emer-
gence of borderization as a material actuality and policy problem for Georgia. Sections
two (domestic) and three (international) examine the border as a site for political
theatre featuring symbolic capital accumulation strategies aimed at outflanking opponents
and ultimately translating symbolic capital into political capital. This may or may not
work. Overall, what we are examining here is entrepreneurship within (geo)political
fields, the cultural mechanisms of power politics in global fields characterized by hierarchy
and hegemony (Bigo 2011; Cooley and Nexon 2016; Goddard and Nexon 2016; Musgrave
and Nexon 2018). These fields are dynamic and games are played on multiple levels over
short and long durations. The outcomes, thus, are works in progress. While structural
advantages lie with powerful states to shape geopolitical fields and socialize small states
into their networks, smaller states can exercise power within these networks by “educat-
ing”hegemonic state elites into sharing and citing their affective geopolitical tropes, as we
will explain below.
The birth of borderization
The August 2008 war saw the defeat of the Georgian government’s attempt to regain
control and sovereignty over territories that had remained independent of its control
since Georgia’s recognition as a sovereign state in the wake of the dissolution of the
Soviet Union. These territories were controlled by the self-proclaimed Republic of
South Ossetia, one of a few de facto states that sprung up in the wake of the USSR’s dis-
integration. The Republic saw itself as a successor to the South Ossetia Autonomous
Oblast (SOAO). The SOAO was created in 1922 as a peacekeeping compromise after
fighting between Ossetian and Georgian forces in the area. Its border was demarcated
in the years thereafter (Saparov 2010). As the Soviet Union began to disintegrate in the
early 1990s, Georgian nationalist forces moved to abolish the SOAO and seize the territory
while counter-mobilizing Ossetian forces fought back, proclaiming a South Ossetian
Republic separate from Georgia. After considerable fighting in the region in 1991 and
early 1992, Georgia and Russia signed a ceasefire agreement in Sochi (the Dagomys Agree-
ment) in June 1992 that created a Joint Control Commission and a peacekeeping body, the
Joint Peacekeeping Forces group (JPKF), to monitor the region. The JPKF was under
Russian command but comprised peacekeeping soldiers from Georgia, Russia and
North Ossetia. Officials from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe
(OSCE) monitored the ceasefire and facilitated negotiations. The Dagomys Agreement
institutionalized an ambiguous peace in the region. The Republic of South Ossetia con-
trolled most of the former SOAO but not enclaves of mostly ethnic Georgian villages
4G. TOAL (GEARÓID Ó TUATHAIL) AND G. MERABISHVILI
and the Akhalgori region. Trans-Caucasian trading and smuggling meant that borders
were soft rather than hard in the area (International Crisis Group 2018).
After the 2008 August War, the Russian Federation decided that it would recognize the
claims of the Republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia to be independent states. It also
moved to beef up its military presence in both territories, and create a hard border
between both entities and Georgia. Post-war, the government of Mikheil Saakashvili con-
demned this as Russian occupation of Georgian territory. A further implication was that
Georgia was now facing a much more proximate threat from Russian military forces than
ever before. With Russia constructing a more extensive military base in Tskhinval(i) than
existed during the tenure of the JPKF, South Ossetia was viewed as a potential launching
pad for a future Russian invasion of Georgia. Georgian government officials began to
declare that “the enemy stands at 40 kilometres!”The phrase in Georgian became a
slogan in the new cold war between Russia and Georgia. Forty kilometres is the approxi-
mate distance between Tbilisi and the South Ossetian border at Akhalgori.
During the August 2008 war, Russian forces went well beyond South Ossetia and
Abkhazia to occupy large swaths of uncontested Georgian territory. As they withdrew
back to the officially proclaimed borderlines of these entities, Russian military forces
faced the problem of defining precisely where the border control was. Because the
SOAO border was rarely physically demarcated in the landscape, there was some ambigu-
ity about this. In September 2008, Russia and South Ossetia signed an agreement on
“Friendship, Cooperation and Reciprocal Support.”It declared that South Ossetia’s
borders would be patrolled by both Russian and South Ossetian forces (MFA Russia
2008). Later, in April 2009, both governments signed an agreement on “Joint Measures
for Protecting the State Border of South Ossetia”which specifically identified Russia’s
Border Police Department within Federal Security Service (FSB) and South Ossetian Com-
mittee for State Security (KGB) as the responsible border management agencies.
(Together, for example, they detain those charged with illegally crossing into South
Ossetia). While the authorities in Tskhinval(i) view this agreement as “protection”,
Georgia government officials and experts interpret the agreement as the institutionaliza-
tion of a Russian military presence in the South Caucasus, potentially easing the way
for future aggression (Kmuzov and Terashvili 2010). Interestingly, the 2009 agreement
on border control did not indicate there would be any physical barrier construction on
the boundary line between South Ossetia and Georgia (MFA Russia 2009). Later that
year, however, the first signs of this became evident.
The term “borderization”is not an English translation of a Georgian term but a coinage
of the European Union Monitoring Mission in Georgia (EUMM). They define borderiza-
tion as “physical markings and activities on the ground to make visible or obstruct passage
of the [Administrative Boundary] Line”(EUMM 2017). The first instance of borderization
occurred in August 2009 in the village of Kveshi, when Russian border guards attempted
to mark the border, leaving one family’s house on the Ossetian side. Georgian Ministry of
Foreign Affairs promptly protested the “attempt by the Russian occupants to penetrate
into the depth of the Georgian territory”(Civil Georgia 2009a). European monitors
from EUMM directly contacted the Russia border guards and as a result of their effort,
the next day the guards removed the posts (Aptsiauri 2009; Barry 2009). The next incident
happened in September 2010 when border guards again installed metal posts to demarcate
the boundary. In both 2009 and 2010 incidents, locals as well as Georgian authorities
CAUCASUS SURVEY 5
claimed that the FSB border guards moved boundary markers forward into the territory
controlled by Georgia after 2008. The South Ossetian side, however, claimed that they
simply followed the boundaries of SOAO, which sometimes do not coincide with the
actual territorial extent of Georgian controlled areas (Civil Georgia 2010).
The following month in October 2010, South Ossetia’s Ministry of Defence announced
that it had completed what they called “The Southern Wall”–an anti-tank defensive lines
of trenches, moats and dikes, and several watchtowers, meant to protect Tskhinval(i) from
Georgian military attack from the south (Sanakoeva 2010). In August 2012, South Osse-
tian authorities created a border zone, where citizens of South Ossetia and Russia could
enter only with special passes (RES 2012). The width of the border zone ranges from
100 metres to 8 kilometers and its overall area covers 761 square kilometers (Sputnik
2016; Komakhia 2017). In 2017, however, after the inhabitants of border zone complained
to the authorities, South Ossetia relaxed the rules for the locals and allowed movement in
the zone without a special pass. Possession of a state-issued identification document (pass-
port, birth certificate) is still mandatory (Gukumekhov 2017).
Between 2009 and 2011, borderization was limited to the activities of delimiting and
demarcating the boundary line. This included border markings by metal posts and obser-
vation towers. Starting in 2011, barbed wire fences and border signposts appeared in
several villages along the ABL (Yanovskaya 2011). In 2013, South Ossetian authorities
contracted a Stavropol-based company called Stilsoft, which markets itself as specializing
in security systems and surveillance technology, to construct physical barriers (Kotaeva
2014).
2
By 2014, the length of fences and barbed wire barriers stretched up to 50 kilo-
metres, according to the Public Defender’sOffice of Georgia. It is this time around
when the term “borderization”came into use, initially introduced by EUMM (EUMM
2013).
As of early 2018, the Georgian government had a list of 48 locations characterized by
some form of borderization. This covers more than 55 of the 391-kilometre long South
Ossetian boundary line. Much of it cuts through mountainous terrain. Borderization
thus mostly affects the southern section of the line. In addition to metal fences and
barbed wire fences, the borderization infrastructure includes green State Border signs
(bilingual English and Georgian versions facing the Georgian controlled territory and
bilingual Ossetian and Russian ones inside the Ossetian/Russian controlled border
zone), firebreak ground lines and trenches, observation posts and towers, and surveillance
technology, such as cameras and movement detectors (EUMM 2017).
With border formation has come border enforcement against those perceived as violat-
ing the new spatial order. Between 2009 and 2017, more than 900 people from the Geor-
gian side, mostly from the local community, have been detained and charged with illegally
crossing the border; on average 136 detentions per year (EUMM 2017; Komakhia 2017).
These are mostly local cattle herders, or people who attempted to harvest crops, gather
firewood, visit family relatives or tend to graves in local cemeteries. The detainees
usually are returned back after they or their relatives pay a $40 administrative fine for vio-
lating South Ossetia’s state border. In Georgian media, however, these detentions are often
described as gatatseba (kidnapping).
3
As an example of a typical news headline, on 22
March 2018, reporting on such an incident Georgian Public Broadcaster ran the following
headline: “Russian occupiers [rusma okupantebma] kidnapped [gaitatses] two inhabitants
of village Adzvi.”In many cases, the two words dakaveba (detaining) and gatatseba
6G. TOAL (GEARÓID Ó TUATHAIL) AND G. MERABISHVILI
(kidnapping) are used interchangeably. These detentions are part of wider South Ossetian
program of “securing the border”with Georgia. The ethnic Georgians who are detained
comprise only a minor part of the total number of violators of the new border regime.
The great majority of detainees are residents of South Ossetia (EUMM 2017; Tarkhanova
2018).
Given that the war had shifted Georgian discourse about South Ossetia and Abkhazia
from separatism to occupation, it required little conceptual effort to translate border
demarcation efforts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia into material, visible and tangible
symbols of occupation. South Ossetia lent itself much more to this process than Abkhazia
because its border delimitation process required physical demarcation on land that was
often open fields whereas the Georgian-Abkhazian border was demarcated by the
natural physical features of the Enguri/Ingur River. The border fence with its barbed
wires and signposts opened new possibilities to entwine together embodied affect and dis-
course on Russian aggression and occupation. The images of border fences proved irresis-
tible to politicians, a compelling prop for political speech-making. Borderization, as a
result, became a theatrical stage where political actors could perform particular geopoliti-
cal visions to domestic and international audiences.
Enemies within: domestic border theatre
In the early post-war years (2008–2011) when the boundary line between South Ossetia
and Georgian-controlled territories had not yet acquired material form, the border as a
physical place did not feature much in Georgian politics. The situation description “occu-
pation”[okupatsia] immediately after the war became the most common way to describe
the status quo regarding South Ossetia and Abkhazia and its use peaked in 2011, two years
before the intensification of borderization (Comai 2017). In contrast, the term “occupation
line”[saokupatsio khazi/zoli] which currently represents the conventional way to talk
about South Ossetian administrative boundary line/state border, became more popular
in correlation with borderization (Figure 1).
4
Figure 1. Number of articles featuring “occupation line”and “borderization”.
CAUCASUS SURVEY 7
We focus on two periods of domestic political contestation. The first is from 2009 prior
to any visible manifestations of borderization. Here the border has more an imaginative
than a material referent, expressed most commonly by the phrase “The enemy stands at
40 kilometres!”We examine two almost simultaneous political crises in April–May
2009 when the border was used as a rhetorical device to delegitimize opposition to the gov-
ernment. The second period we examine is when borderization became a visible phenom-
enon. Here the phrase “occupation line”[saokupatsio khazi/zoli] entered everyday
political discourse and shaped the 2013 presidential election campaign.
Enemies inside Georgia
Before borderization there was the slogan: “The enemy stands at 40 kilometres!”The phrase
emerged immediately after the end of the 2008 war and quickly became a stock phrase in
Georgian politics. The first use we found was just days after the war when on 16 August
the Georgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs reported that 60 Russian military vehicles were
approaching Akhalgori /Leningor
5
and were thus only 40 kilometres from Tbilisi (IPN
2008). Prior to the war, the Georgian government controlled Akhalgori and surrounding vil-
lages but afterwards the area became the easternmost part of South Ossetian and Russian
controlled territories. This created a Russian military presence in a space that was previously
Georgian. “The enemy stands at 40 kilometres”articulated this new sense of geographic
proximity and vulnerability. In November 2008, testifying before the Parliamentary Com-
mittee investigating the war President Saakashvili declared that given continuing Russian
aggression when “the occupation army stands at few kilometers from Tbilisi”, other govern-
ments would have consolidated political control and silenced opposition parties and media,
but his government, instead, allowed more freedom of speech and free press, more parlia-
mentary discussions and rights (Civil Georgia 2008a).
The following year saw two significant political challenges to the Saakashvili govern-
ment. First, in April 2009 large opposition rallies started in central Tbilisi demanding Saa-
kashvili’s resignation. The protesters occupied Tbilisi’s main avenue in front of the
Parliament building by setting up dozens of tents and blocking traffic in the area for
weeks. Second, on 5 May 2009, a tank battalion at the Mukhrovani military base near
Tbilisi, staged a mutiny, allegedly aimed at thwarting NATO military exercises scheduled
the next day and possibly overthrowing the government. Saakashvili responded to these
two different challenges with speeches that in both cases evoked the enemy army standing
at 40 kilometres. To the political opposition, the president made an appeal to “stand
together in front of the enemy, who stays 40 kilometers away from Tbilisi and aims its
cannons against us”(Civil Georgia 2009b). A week later, in his televised address to the
nation, Saakashvili described the ongoing Mukhrovani mutiny at the time in the following
way:
When the enemy is staying inside Georgia, 40 kilometers away from the Georgian capital,
when a huge quantity of artillery weapons are aimed at us, we cannot allow any long-term
unrests in Georgia, because it will be a sword stabbed into the heart of democracy, it will
be a very dangerous act directed against Georgian statehood. (Civil Georgia 2009c)
The phrase “any long-term unrests”certainly refers not only to the Mukhrovani mutiny,
which had just begun, but also to the political rallies and tent city on Rustaveli Avenue in
8G. TOAL (GEARÓID Ó TUATHAIL) AND G. MERABISHVILI
central Tbilisi then a month old. In fact, he began his television address by claiming:
“Russia has increased its presence on the occupied territories of Georgia three-fold”,
hoping to use “a possibility of mass unrests in the center of Georgian capital”as a
pretext to carry out a military action “against Georgia’s sovereignty, our freedom and inde-
pendence and naturally against Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic and European integration”(Civil
Georgia 2009c). The rhetorical framing was typical of the messiah complex thinking that
long characterized Saakashvili’s rule: he alone represents the nation while his opponents
are either willing or unwitting allies of Georgia’s historic and very proximate enemy.
Both enemies are dangerously within.
Border campaigns
In April 2012, a new political coalition party called Georgian Dream (GD) was created to
form a unified challenge to Mikheil Saakashvili and his United National Movement
(UNM) government. Funded by the Georgian billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, GD’s emer-
gence precipitated an intensification of Saakashvili’s nationalist rhetoric as both competed
for votes in the October 2012 parliamentary elections. UNM accused GD of being pro-
Russian and described Ivanishvili himself as a Russian oligarch. Saakashvili’s government
even went so far as to strip Ivanishvili of his Georgian citizenship. In the end, however, this
campaign did not succeed for the elections brought the GD coalition into power in the
parliament. Saakashvili, however, remained as president until the October 2013 presiden-
tial elections. This one-year period of cohabitation institutionalized a deeply polarized pol-
itical scene in which natsebi and kotsebi (UNM and GD supporters respectively) faced off
daily. Georgia’s media was politicized and polarized by this clash. Not surprisingly, foreign
and security policies were hostage to this toxic party rivalry. GD’s initial programme to
normalize relations with Russia provoked fierce criticism from the UNM, which
accused Ivanishvili and his government of being soft on Russia and willing to accommo-
date Russia’s interests at the expense of Georgia’sown.GD’s accommodationist stance, its
critics argued, would further embolden Russia. It was within this highly charged political
scene that borderization emerged as a political issue.
On 27 May 2013, Russian border guards installed a new line of barbed wire barriers
near the village of Ditsi in Gori district, a few kilometres south of Tskhinvali, South Osse-
tia’s capital. Ditsi locals claimed that the new border was 300 metres deeper into Georgian
controlled territory and left their farmland and pasture on the other side of the fence. This
was not the first such incident of borderization but it was the first reported on by all major
TV channels and news agencies. On the same day, soon after the news broke, two UNM
leaders visited the village where one of them, Givi Targamadze, blamed the GD govern-
ment’s“unilateral concessions”to Russia for borderization (Civil Georgia 2013b). The
locals, however, were quick to counter-blame the UNM politicians for “losing”these ter-
ritories in 2008. Saakashvili commented on the same day and refrained from blaming GD’s
policies for borderization; however, his chief of staffAndro Barnovi claimed that the Ditsi
incident was a result of GD’s softened rhetoric on Russia. Other UNM lawmakers
described this incident as evidence of creeping occupation [mtsotsavi okupatsia] and
creeping annexation [mtsotsavi aneksia]. These frames, which were not new but still
not in wide usage, began to resonate as geopolitically correct ways of describing the
process of borderization, particularly among UNM supporters (Figure 2).
6
CAUCASUS SURVEY 9
The GD government countered these accusations by arguing that this was a mere con-
tinuation of Saakashvili’s 2008 blunder. Most GD officials also disagreed with the descrip-
tion of the Ditsi incident as “creeping occupation”. Instead, Minister of Reintegration
Paata Zakareishvili claimed that “Russians are strengthening the positions which they
invaded and occupied”earlier in 2008. Furthermore, he defined the process of borderiza-
tion as “a test of Georgian statehood and its pragmatic policy”. He explained that “Russia
wants to turn politics into emotions. Our key task is to keep calm and protect our citizens”
(IPN 2013). Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili described the incident as a “misunder-
standing”and “some kind of provocation”and suggested that people not “fall into hys-
teria”(Civil Georgia 2013d). Saakashvili, in an address on 31 May 2013, also saw the
incident as “provocation”but one aimed at “testing the firmness of Georgia’s current gov-
ernment”. The Ditsi incident, he averred, was proof that “Russia’s strict actions are directly
proportional to Georgia’s soft rhetoric”(Civil Georgia 2013j).
The process of border creation in Ditsi and several other villages continued over
summer. After a few weeks of inactivity, Russian/South Ossetian border guards
resumed fence construction in Ditsi on 17 September 2013 and in Dvani on 22 September.
With the presidential election only a month away and new GD and UNM candidates vying
for office, these activities became media stories and opportunities for the UNM to push
their narrative of creeping occupation enabled by weak GD leadership. One pro-UNM
publication, Tabula, created a special feature on borderization called “Barbed wires”[mav-
tulkhlartebi]. Between 27 May and 17 September, only four articles addressed the issue. In
the forty-day period between 17 September and election day on 27 October, the publi-
cation ran 53 articles on borderization.
Unsurprisingly, sites of borderization soon became backdrops for political campaign
stops. On 23 September various presidential candidates arrived in Dvani and Ditsi to cri-
ticize government inactivity, presenting themselves as the leaders who would halt “creep-
ing occupation”. The GD government, for its part, denied that the border had moved
further into Georgian-controlled territory. GD’s presidential candidate Giorgi
Figure 2. Number of articles featuring “borderization”,“creeping occupation”and “creeping
annexation”.
10 G. TOAL (GEARÓID Ó TUATHAIL) AND G. MERABISHVILI
Margvelashvili declared that “the Georgian state will not yield to provocations”(Civil
Georgia 2013g).
Saakashvili, at the time attending the United Nations General Assembly in New York,
made a televised address on Georgian TV on September 23. He stated that although
“Russia is carrying out a planned attack on Georgia’s sovereign borders regardless of
who is in Georgia’s government,”he also argued that Russia views GD’s“incomprehensi-
ble reverences [before Russia]”as a “sign of weakness.”A“policy of appeasement before
Russia will be counter-productive”, he asserted. The proper position in this situation, Saa-
kashvili said, would be for “all the political forces, government and me [to] show unity and
firmness …to fight for [Georgia’s] interests”(Civil Georgia 2013g). In a similar spirit,
UNM presidential candidate Davit Bakradze, after visiting the border fence in Dvani on
30 September, suggested to all the presidential candidates to set aside political campaign-
ing for one day and protest the occupation together (Netgazeti 2013).
Saakashvili arrived back in Tbilisi on 29 September with a crowd of his supporters
greeting him at the airport. In a speech there he declared himself ready to work with
the GD government to stop together the “stealthy and a very dangerous annexation of
our territories”. At the same time, he claimed that under GD government leadership,
Georgia had already lost in recent months control over more farmland than was lost in
the Georgian enclave during the 2008 war (Civil Georgia 2013i). The claim was hardly
credible. Ivanishvili responded that this was not a “healthy assessment”. Although “no
one can justify Russia’s aggression and it is clear that territories are occupied”, the
prime minister stated, it is Saakashvili who “bears [the] lion’s share of blame”(Civil
Georgia 2013e).
Coming to the end of his tenure in political office, Saakashvili saw the issue as part of his
singular heroic struggle to defend Georgia. On 9 October, he proposed to convene the
National Security Council to discuss the “shifting of occupation line”deeper into Geor-
gian-controlled territory (Civil Georgia 2013h). Both PM Ivanishvili and Parliament
Speaker Davit Usupashvili declined the invitation and dubbed it a “PR masquerade.”
The NSC secretary and a UNM leader Giga Bokeria, however, called their decision regard-
ing “the most painful issue for our country …regrettable, alarming and incomprehensi-
ble”(Civil Georgia 2013f). Minister Zakareishvili, however, explained that Saakashvili
“wants us to participate in this theatre”which would be nothing more than empty talk
and an opportunity for the president to “win political points”(Tabula 2013a). Saakashvili
pressed on. On 10 October, he travelled to Dvani and made a televised statement in front
of the border fence and a signpost. “Behind me you all see this shameful curtain,”he said.
The “occupier is attacking our sovereignty, independence, freedom and future.”The Rus-
sians, he stated, are “creeping more and more forward”and could well cut the country’s
main east–west highway and the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline (both a few kilometres
from the South Ossetia boundary line). Not only was farmland being taken but so also was
the future of Georgian statehood and sovereignty (Saakashvili cited in Tabula 2013b).
In summary, the process of borderization became a rhetorical and symbolic resource
for the UNM to attack the GD government from 2012 onwards. The physical barriers pro-
vided visual evidence for hawkish politicians within the UNM to criticize the GD’s attempt
to normalize relations with Russia. Occasionally this rhetoric went as far as accusing the
GD of secretly doing Russia’s bidding in Georgia. At a rally entitled “No to Annexation,”
for example, Nika Melia, UNM’s Tbilisi mayoral candidate in the 2014 local elections, told
CAUCASUS SURVEY 11
the crowd: “The enemy, standing in 40 kilometers will not be able to harm us, if we don’t
have a collaborationist government in 400 meters from here”[referring to the State Chan-
cellery] (Civil Georgia 2014). The enemy, in short, was within Georgia’s rightful territory
and within its own government buildings.
Border tourism for international officials
Since the presidency of Eduard Shevardnadze, Georgian diplomats and politicians have
worked hard to present the country as a worthy candidate for international support and
aid. Building on Shevardnadze’s aspiration for Georgia to join NATO, Mikheil Saakash-
vili made this goal central to his foreign policy, only to be frustrated by the Bucharest
Declaration in April 2008; he then led Georgia into what became a disastrous five-day
war with Russia (Toal 2017). One feature of the war was the fierce presentation of
Georgia as a victim of Russian aggression to Euro-Atlantic audiences, a strategy that
reaped the reward of $4.5 billion recovery and reconstruction aid from the United
States and other countries. That strategy continued in the post-war period, with the rec-
ognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states seen as an affront to Geor-
gian sovereignty. Any border demarcations in these regions, thus, was further evidence
of Georgia’s outrageous victimization. In this section, we focus on three distinct
moments in the emergence of the South Ossetian border as a theatre displaying Geor-
gia’ssuffering.
“Unpredictable people”
Polish President Lech Kaczyński visited Georgia on 23 November 2008, three months after
the August war. Saakashvili hosted Kaczyński in Tbilisi to mark the fifth anniversary of the
Rose Revolution which brought Saakashvili’s United National Movement into power in
2003. During the stay in Georgia, Saakashvili, Kaczyński and an accompanying media
pool went to visit a village of internally displaced persons (IDPs) from South Ossetia.
Rather than head back to Tbilisi, however, Saakashvili decided to take his guest and
accompanying media to the South Ossetia administrative boundary line (ABL), so that
Kaczyński could see the Russian military presence firsthand. Saakashvili wanted to
show that Russia did not comply with the ceasefire agreement and had not withdrawn
its troops. At the time, there was no border fence built yet but the ABL was already
dotted with checkpoints on all the main roads going into and out of South Ossetia.
When the travelling convoy approached a Russian checkpoint near the village of Odzisi
(approximately 40 kilometres from Tbilisi), the border guards across the ABL opened
fire, shooting in the air. Nobody was hurt. The incident was captured on the camera
and aired on TV, offering visual evidence of Georgia’s occupation while for the president’s
critics it was a typically reckless Saakashvili provocation (Kunchulia 2008). Back in Tbilisi,
Saakashvili and Kaczyński held a press conference, where Saakashvili explained that only
one cameraman from his staffwas present, who always accompanies him. To him this
incident was “a clear reminder of Russia’s continuing occupation of the Georgian terri-
tories”and evidence that Russians were “savage”and “unpredictable people”(Civil
Georgia 2008b). Kaczyński advised his EU, US and NATO colleagues to “draw conclusions
before it is too late”(Vartanyan and Barry 2008).
12 G. TOAL (GEARÓID Ó TUATHAIL) AND G. MERABISHVILI
The episode shows how Saakashvili used the border as a prop to clearly articulate the
narrative of Russian aggression and enrich it with visual and affective elements. Perhaps
because of the shooting incident, the Georgian government refrained from taking their
high-level guests to the ABL afterwards. It became a practice only in 2013 when border-
ization entered its active, material phase.
Border tours
On 27 May 2013 when the border fence was first installed in Ditsi and became a major
media story, the Georgian Minister of Foreign Affairs Maia Panjikidze send a note of
protest to Russia. She also informed all Tbilisi-based foreign ambassadors about the inci-
dent. A few days later on 3 June, foreign diplomats and representatives of international
organizations were briefed by a high-ranking Georgian Interior Ministry government
official that “wire fences were installed deeper into the Tbilisi-administered territories”
(Civil Georgia 2013c). The Ministry of the Interior followed this by organizing a tour of
affected villages along the boundary line on 7 June for foreign officials. In Khurvaleti, a
local woman apologized to the foreign diplomats for not being able to host them properly
at home due to the barbed wire fence in her garden which prevented guests’access to her
house. She then told the diplomats that three people died in the village recently but the
border guards would not allow them to be buried in the village cemetery on the other
side of the fence. The guards, she complained, also barred her access to water.
The tour reportedly made a strong impression on the foreign diplomats. “This is unac-
ceptable! This is a human rights violation. I can’t even believe that this is actually happen-
ing! This is tragedy!”exclaimed a Bulgarian diplomat. A NATO representative compared
the fences along the ABL to the Berlin Wall. Taking notes and photographs, the diplomats
promised their local hosts they would do everything possible to stop the borderization
process (Vartanyan 2013).
After its apparent success, the Ministries of Interior and Foreign Affairs worked
together to create a similar tour from Tbilisi to the villages of Khurvaleti, Ditsi and
Dvani on 4 October 2013. In a subsequent press release Foreign Affairs Ministry reported
that “diplomats talked with the local inhabitants and learned about alarming conditions
created as a result of installation of barbed wires and artificial barriers by Russia’s occu-
pation army”(MFA Georgia 2013). The Czech ambassador described the situation as “a
tragedy [of] the local community divided in two,”while US ambassador Richard
Norland spoke of a “shocking scene of artificial division and separation.”He also added
that this “tragic situation …reminds me of the Berlin Wall …In the modern world bar-
riers like this should be coming down, not going up”(Civil Georgia 2013a)(Figure 3).
Thereafter, a visit to the South Ossetian ABL became one stop on the “grand tour”of
international officials visiting Georgia. In May 2015, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs orga-
nized a several-day long Diplomatic Tour for the ambassadors and diplomatic represen-
tatives of 75 countries. The tour was mostly centred on Adjara region on the coast of Black
Sea in western Georgia and aimed at advertising Georgia’s economic and touristic poten-
tial. Despite the cultural and economic focus of the Diplomatic Tour, the MFA added a
destination which seems incongruous: the South Ossetian boundary line in Khurvaleti
to visit Data Vanishvili. Georgian government’s English-language news service reported
that “visit to the barbed wired zone seems to be impressive for the foreign diplomats
CAUCASUS SURVEY 13
[who] witnessed the difficult conditions of how locals live in the conflict zone”(Agenda
2015). “Our task was to show to our partners the conditions at the occupation line …vil-
lages torn in the middle …separated families …and Russia’s continuous aggressive policy
which continues in the shape [of borderization],”explained Georgia’s Foreign Minister
Tamar Beruchashvili (Maestro 2015).
Pain projection
The dramatic events in Ukraine in 2014, including the Russian annexation of Crimea and
war in Donbas, created a new opportunity for the Georgian government to re-tell its story
of victimization at the hands of Russia in 2008. The August War was widely represented as
prologue to Crimea, a position Georgian government officials were happy to promote
(Toal 2017, 208). Georgian officials, however, also feared that their territorial problems
would become secondary to those in Ukraine. President Giorgi Margvelashvili, the Geor-
gian Dream candidate that replaced Saakashvili, wanted the United States and EU/NATO
focused on the occupation and borderization of Georgian territories. In the annual presi-
dential speech before the Parliament in March 2015, President Margvelashvili declared
that “Georgian security is directly linked with European [EU] and Euro-Atlantic
[NATO] integration”and that “Georgia’s problems [problematika] should always stay
in the international political agenda”(Netgazeti 2015). In a later parliamentary address
in April 2017, he argued that “with the new administration in the White House, it is extre-
mely important to actively appear on Washington’s radars”(Machavariani 2017). Border
tourism and border performances became a component part of this policy.
One man, namely Data Vanishvili of Khurvaleti, would play an important role in repre-
senting Georgian victimhood to US and European decision-makers. Borderization left
Data Papa (as he is locally known), his house and much of his backyard on the South Osse-
tian controlled side, leaving part of his garden on the Georgian-controlled side which he
Figure 3. Diplomats visit Data Vanishvili in his divided property in Khurvaleti in May 2015 as part of the
MFA-organized Diplomatic Tour 2015.
14 G. TOAL (GEARÓID Ó TUATHAIL) AND G. MERABISHVILI
can access only by climbing over a barbed wire fence and therefore, violating South Osse-
tian border regime and risking being detained by Russian and Ossetian border guards.
Although he has continued living in his house on the Ossetian side, he refuses to take a
South Ossetian passport, identifying instead as a citizen of Georgia.
At the end of December 2016, a bipartisan congressional delegation comprised of Sena-
tors John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Amy Klobuchar embarked on a tour of the Euro-
pean countries bordering Russia –the Baltic states, Ukraine and Georgia –to reaffirm US
commitment to them. After visiting a Ukrainian military outpost at the frontline of the
Donbas conflict zone near Mariupol on New Year’s Eve, the trio of senators travelled to
Georgia. There the senators visited Data Vanishvili in Khurvaleti on 1 January 2017.
An American journalist dubbed McCain’s handshake with Vanishvili across the barbed
wire border as “the most geopolitically provocative move that McCain made during his
weeklong tour of countries on Russia’s frontier”(Cathcart 2017). In Vanishvili’s backyard
McCain made this statement: “This man, like so many thousands of others, has had his life
destroyed by Russian aggression. We must understand that Vladimir Putin, unless we
stand up to him, will continue his aggression. We must stand up to Vladimir Putin”
(U.S. Embassy in Georgia 2017). Although this comment did not significantly differ
from McCain’s hawkish views on Russia, it expresses affective force that is beyond mere
verbal utterance and that allows this statement to resonate with audiences who would
sympathize with the old man in Khurvaleti (Koschut et al. 2017)(Figure 4).
Such embodied encounters with what is presented here as geopolitical injustice, Russian
aggression and Georgian victimhood create affective commitments that impact world-
views of decision-makers and wider audiences. A year later in March 2018 President
Margvelashvili visited Washington, D.C. At a public event in the US Congress, Senator
Amy Klobuchar met Margvelashvili. In her speech Klobuchar recalled the trip to the
South Ossetian boundary line to visit a farmer whose garden was divided in the middle
by barbed wires. She then made an argument that US should “learn from Georgia and
other democracies on the frontline, on the barbed wire line”about how to stand up to
Russia and its interference in US elections.
Less than three months after the senators’visit, on 29 March 2017 President Margve-
lashvili brought Latvian President Raimonds Vejonis to Vanishvili’s divided garden as part
of the latter’sofficial visit to Georgia. Vanishvili told the guests about sickness of his wife
and asked for agricultural machinery to cultivate the land. At the scene, Margvelashvili
told the reporters how “especially emotionally important it is for us when our friends
come here to see with their own eyes this historical injustice that is occurring in this
village, on our soil.”The Latvian President reciprocated by promising that Latvia would
never recognize Russian occupation of Georgian territory (President of Georgia 2017c).
In July 2017, the Georgian President visited Vanishvili together with Ukrainian Presi-
dent Petro Poroshenko. “Today at the occupation line we came as the presidents of two
proud nations which do not accept Russian aggression,”said the Georgian leader. Por-
oshenko acknowledged how important it was for him to be at this place: “Look at the
eyes of this man [Vanishvili] behind barbed wires. That is the result of the policies of
Russian Federation.”Poroshenko then described the space that barbed wires occupied
between him and Vanishvili as a “gap between the past and the future.”He further
specified that this is the line that divides, on the one side, happy people, economic pro-
gress, investors, flourish[ing] Tbilisi, beautiful hotels in Batumi and, on the other side,
CAUCASUS SURVEY 15
tears and humanitarian catastrophe brought by Russia (President of Georgia 2017a)
(Figure 5).
Data Vanishvili’s year of high-level meetings ended with a visit from the Estonian Pre-
sident Kersti Kaljulaid on 2 November 2017. President Margvelashvili thanked his Esto-
nian colleague that she came, “like many other European leaders, and saw with her
own eyes these barbed wires and the historical injustice with which an Eastern European
country –Georgia –lives”. President Kaljulaid responded that she will use “all the correct
diplomatic terminology”to express Estonia’s support for Georgia’s territorial integrity and
that this conflict requires more international attention, and “of course, it goes without
saying that we continue making these points as strong as we can”. But these “euphemisms
we are using for this line”, pointing towards the barrier, do not show enough the human
suffering this fence brings when it prevents people’s access to healthcare and their rela-
tives. She then declared that “the correct word for what we are seeing here is the evil
line”(President of Georgia 2017b). On Twitter she posted an image of Vanishvili
behind razor wire with the description: “On the line of evil –fence between #Georgia &
occupied territory of South Ossetia. It cannot and will not be accepted nor forgotten.”
7
Figure 4. John McCain’s tweet about his visit to Data Vanishvili.
16 G. TOAL (GEARÓID Ó TUATHAIL) AND G. MERABISHVILI
Conclusion
It is now commonplace to argue that contemporary border walls function as symbolic
responses to crises produced by eroded sovereign state capacities. “To say these walls are
more theatrical than mechanical in their function is not to dismiss their importance; the
theatre matters a great deal in an era in which states perdure as their sovereign powers
wane, and powerful new nationalisms and reactionary citizen subjectivities are one result,”
writes Wendy Brown (Jones et al. 2017,2).Georgia’sborderwalldramaprovidesadistinctive
twist on Brown’s analysis. The border construction process is occurring within the context of
a longstanding territorial dispute that has become infused with a broader geopolitical struggle.
Figure 5. Kersti Kaljulaid’s tweet after her visit to Data Vanishvili.
CAUCASUS SURVEY 17
While borderization may represent safety, security and containment to the once exposed and
vulnerable “citizens”of the contested Republic of South Ossetia fearing renewed attack from
Georgia, border fence construction within Georgia is a field for (geo)political entrepreneur-
ship. To hardliners wishing to prevent any political rapprochement with Russia, the border
represents the enemy at 40 kilometres, the enemy within the internationally recognized ter-
ritorial geo-body. The concerted effort by former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili to
use borderization for domestic political advantage, however, did not prevent the defeat of
UNM’s presidential candidate in 2013, an outcome that calls into question the effectiveness
of his strategy (though there were many other factors).
While the Republic of South Ossetia nominally builds the ABL to assert itself as a sover-
eign nation-state with an integral territorial body, Georgian state officials use these border
fences to represent their state as the geopolitical victim of an imperialist power, an injured
body suffering injustice. This victimhood and injustice is given micro-geographic visibility
and personal form by Data Vanishvili, his household, land and village. The varied material-
ities of borderization –fences, signposts, watchtowers and barbed wires –are compelling
symbolic objects of national suffering. Just as Russian tanks became signifiers of invasion
and aggression, so barbed wire is a signifier of division and conflict, of Cold War and imperi-
alism. Barbed wire, with its potential to physicallyharmanyhumanbodythattriestotrans-
gress it, became an affective agent that needs no further verbal explanation and persuasion: it
“goes-without-saying”that Russia is an aggressor and Georgia is a victim (Ahall 2018). The
state-organized diplomatic tours at the boundary line represent a form of affective geopolitics
that invites international guests to see Georgia’s wounds and feel its pain (Wetherell 2012). It
is an exercise of “political subject-making …[through] common sensory experience of the
landscape”(Dittmer 2017, 113) –a recruitment of foreign officials to Georgia’scausevia
embodied participation in an affective assemblage of human suffering, material infrastructure
and geopolitical injustice available for social media sharing.
The ostensible purpose of this affective geopolitics and symbolic capital accumulation is
to strengthen the position of Georgia in international affairs. With Russia as the dominant
military power, Georgian state officials long ago decided to try to change the terms of
regional power asymmetries by seeking membership in NATO and presenting their
state as an attractive Western ally (Toal 2017). To Russia’s military power, it responds
with symbolic power strategies that appeal for sympathy and solidarity from NATO
states, most especially the United States. The hope is to secure hard security guarantees
through NATO membership. Some tangible gains from these affective strategies are
evident in US-Georgia relations: a formal Strategic Partnership, Georgian troop partici-
pation in NATO military exercises, millions in US financial aid each year (over $96
million in 2016), supportive US Congressional resolutions, and high-profile meetings
and events in Washington DC promoting Georgia. Despite changing political winds,
the US’s public commitment to support Georgia joining NATO has also endured. Geopo-
litical tensions between the West and Russia have broadly boosted Georgia’sefforts to pos-
ition itself as a “frontline state,”with a “little Berlin Wall,”in a New Cold War, rather than
a small weak Caucasian state struggling with enduring local territorial disputes (Boyle
2016a). Despite the president’s own obsessive commitment to border walls and question-
ing of US overseas deployments, Trump administration policies toward Georgia have been
more hawkish than those of the Obama administration. In August 2017, for example, US
Vice President Mike Pence visited Georgia and addressed over 1600 US military personnel
18 G. TOAL (GEARÓID Ó TUATHAIL) AND G. MERABISHVILI
and Georgian troops participating in a seven state NATO organized military exercise
called “Noble Partner”. His framing of the geopolitical context fused classic Cold War
and adapted Georgian tropes:
We stand here today in the gap, on a frontline of freedom, a frontline compromised by
Russian aggression nearly a decade ago. At this very moment, just 40 miles from where
we stand, Russian tanks sit on Georgian land in South Ossetia. Today, Russia continues to
occupy one-fifth of Georgian territory. The United States strongly condemns Russia’s occu-
pation of Georgia’s soil.
8
A year later, on the tenth anniversary of the August War, the same NATO organized military
exercise featured 1170 US troops. In late 2017 the US Defense Cooperation Board approved a
$75 million sale of advanced anti-tank Javelin missiles made by US defence contractors to
Georgia, a repudiation of the Obama administration’s policy of not selling such weapon
systems to Georgia (and to Ukraine, which also purchased the system) (Cecire 2018).
There are, of course, many reasons why the United States supports Georgia’sterritorial
integrity and affirms tropes like “occupied territories”and visions of the enemy at 40 kilo-
metres or miles. Hegemonic geopolitical cultures are adaptive, and can incorporate small
aspirational client state geopolitical tropes to serve their own strategic ends. But such rhe-
torical solidarity can produce rhetorical entrapment. Hegemonic states become frame
takers not frame makers. A slogan of solidarity made famous in August 2008 by Senator
McCain –“we are all Georgians now”–also unwitting expresses a condition wherein a hege-
monic state can allow a small state to frame its geopolitical interests. This does not necess-
arily serve the small state well. Georgia’s longstanding territorial troubles are more intensely
geopoliticized by NATO military exercises and arms sales. Ostensibly symbolic displays of
solidarity with Georgia also deepen insecurity in the region and beyond (Clem 2018).
Indeed, contradictions abound in the New Cold War. At the same time as Euro-Atlan-
tic liberals condemn Russian borderization in Georgia and speak of a “Europe, whole, free
and at peace,”many within that community are creating fortifications and sphere
defences. Dispute over the building of a border wall with Mexico convulse the US political
system. Britain struggles over its Brexit borders. Poland, under the sway of Lech Kaczyńs-
ki’s brother Jarosław, has drifted towards authoritarianism. In 2015 it started building six
watch towers to surveil the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad (Agence France-Presse 2015). It
recently committed to spend $4.75 billion purchasing two Patriot missile batteries from
US defence corporation Raytheon, the largest arms procurement deal in its history.
Ukraine in 2014 announced a Project Wall to fortify its 2,000-kilometer border with
Russia (the project has stalled amidst corruption allegations) (Pikulicka-Wilczewska
2018). Estonia also announced it was building a border fence with Russia in 2015. The pro-
jected fence will be about 110 km long and 2.5 m (8 ft) high (BBC 2015). The desire for
hardened borders, thus, agitates political life across Europe, North America and
beyond. Amidst this, Georgia’s borderization theatrics is but a minor sideshow.
Notes
1. The scene is from Toma Chagelishvili’s documentary film “I Didn’t Cross The Border, The
Border Crossed Me”. Trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzaUGKbeSMU&t=40s.
2. The list of Stilsoft’s contractors is mainly comprised of Russian state agencies, FSB’s Border
Police Department, among them. Other private clients include Gazprom, Lukoil, and
CAUCASUS SURVEY 19
Rosneft. The company’s website does not list the KGB of the Republic of South Ossetia as a
customer.
3. Online news website IPN.ge lists 304 articles, starting from February 2009, that include both
gatatseba [kidnapping] and okupatsia/okupirebuli/okupanti [occupation/occupied/occupier].
4. Figure 1 is based on word count within the archive of Georgian language online news agency
InterPressNews (IPN). The first significant bump (Blue line) coincides with 2013 May–June
period, peaking in September–October period of the same year.
5. After 2008, South Ossetian authorities renamed Akhalgori and revived its Soviet-era name
Leningor(i).
6. Figure 2 is based on word count within the archive of Georgian language online news agency
InterPressNews (IPN).
7. See https://twitter.com/KerstiKaljulaid/status/925999097403846656/photo/1.
8. The text of Pence’s speech is available at https://ge.usembassy.gov/remarks-vp-noble-partner-
participants/. For a video montage of Pence’s remarks, with inspirational musical effects added,
see https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/vice-president-pence-europe-georgia/.
Acknowledgements
This paper was presented at the Association for the Study of Nationalities conference in New York
in May 2018. We would like to Ralph Clem for comments and suggestions, and Susan Allen for
inspiration and encouragement. We would also like to thank this journal’s two anonymous
reviewers for their constructive feedback on improving the paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
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