D3.2 Country Report | July 2021
Author: Shota Kakabadze, Georgian Institute of Politics (GIP)
The following document, a report on radicalization and de-radicalization, was produced for the D.Rad project with the objectives of exposing the main trends of radicalization in Georgia: namely, identifying the actors and individuals who feature in radicalization events and examine the various factors on micro, meso and macro levels that facilitate such developments.
For this purpose, this report identifies two hotspots of radicalization and engages in their analysis. These are the attack on the LGBTQI community on May 17, 2013, and the violent attempt to storm a movie theatre on November 8, 2019. Actors and organisations have been identified as the main drivers of radicalization include alt-right groups, the Union of Orthodox Parents, and clergymen.
This report engages not only with the analysis of factors on a variety of levels, but also codes the discourse articulated by these actors behind the violent attacks, placing them on the I-GAP spectrum (injustice which lead to grievance, alienation, and polarisation). This questionnaire quantifies those narratives and helps with the measurement of (de)radicalization trends.
The main findings of this report suggest that in the case of alt-right and Orthodox Christian fundamentalists, key micro level factors include “defence of traditional values” and “family purity”, while meso factors are the network of different alt-right actors and unions. As for macro level factors, they include events on the world stage: the collapse of the USSR, the high level of economic inequality, the War in the Middle East, and the Second Chechen War.