After the Square: Why Georgian Protests Need a Paradigm Shift

“If I stop showing up, I feel like I’m betraying everyone else still standing there and sitting in the jail.”– A personal communication with a protestor, Tbilisi, March 2024

For over a hundred days, people have gathered again on Rustaveli Avenue in Tbilisi. Some come after work, some skip classes, some bring their children. They raise flags, dance, chant against authoritarianism, carry signs quoting Europe’s founding ideals. There is courage and conviction, often humor, sometimes tears.

But behind the banners and bravado, other feelings might circulate quietly—fear and fatigue. In a country where protest can cost your job, your safety, or your future, fear is not failure—it’s the terrain people are learning to navigate together. Fatigue is not just physical exhaustion, but a deeper uncertainty about a fundamental question: Does any of this still matter?

This moment is familiar to many Georgians. We have marched in the streets for over three decades—against opression, injustice, election fraud, violence, impunity, and now, again, against the encroaching authoritarianism of the ruling Georgian Dream party. The names change, the slogans evolve, the anger returns. But very little transforms.

So what explains this? Why are protests so persistent in Georgia—and yet, so politically ineffective?

The answer, I believe, lies not only in the regime’s growing repression or the weakness of the opposition parties. It lies in how we understand protest itself.

When Marching Isn’t Enough

For too long, we have treated protest as a moment. A reaction. A spectacle. We take to the streets when something terrible happens—a sadistic abusive tape is released, a controversial law is passed, a Russian communist sits in the Georgian Parliament chair, elections are rigged. We gather. We shout. We hope. We go home. We repeat.

This model of protest—as event, rupture, emotional outburst—has become deeply familiar, not just in Georgia, but globally. It can be morally powerful and personally transformative. But in the face of regimes that have learned to manage crisis, weaponize fatigue, and outlast outrage, this model has reached its limit.

It’s time for something else.

What we need now is a paradigm shift: from protest as a one-time event to protest as a political ecosystem.

From Storm to Vineyard

Most our protests are like storm bursts—loud, righteous, and unforgettable, but gone as quickly as they arrive. That’s how many protests feel: an eruption, then silence. What Georgia needs now is something closer to a vineyard. A vineyard doesn’t bloom overnight. It is planted with care, rooted deep into hard soil, pruned through seasons, and tended across generations. It requires patience, labor, trust in cycles. And when it bears fruit, it does so not just once, but year after year—sustaining life long after the storm has passed. Protest may spark change, but only the slow, deliberate work of cultivation can make that change endure.

An ecosystem is not just a crowd. It is a network of relationships, a structure of support, a shared set of practices and values that extend far beyond the square.

Protests without ecosystems can capture attention—but they often cannot hold power. That’s why, despite widespread public support, the protests of 2020 (after rigged elections), 2021 (after political arrests and media crackdowns), and 2023 (against the “foreign agents” law) failed to bring meaningful institutional change. The government absorbed the anger, conceded cosmetically, and quietly reintroduced its agenda months later—often more aggressively.

What an Ecosystem Might Look Like

What does it mean, in practical and theoretical terms, to build a movement-as-ecosystem in Georgia? Unlike the event paradigm, that has roots has its most formal philosophical roots in Alain Badiou and that centers protest as rupture—urgent, moral, and visible—the ecosystem paradigm understands resistance as a slow, compositional process of cultivating political capacity across space, time, and form.

At its core, an ecosystem is not defined by a singular event or centralized leadership, but by distributed interdependence. Each actor—legal advocacy group, documentary filmmaker, or rural organizer—occupies a distinct role within the movement’s ecology. What sustains the whole is not uniformity but strategic diversity, where each node reinforces the others through differentiation, not duplication.

This starts with civic infrastructure—but not in the narrow sense of NGOs or donor-funded projects. Ecosystemic infrastructure refers to institutions of support that are movement-adjacent yet resilient, designed to endure cycles of mobilization and repression. In Georgia’s case, this includes not only defense lawyers who still effectively work despite significant government pressure but decentralized legal aid collectives with protocols for rapid mobilization when arrests occur. Civic infrastructure also means regional networks – not necessarily as extensions of Tbilisi-based movements, but as autonomous hubs grounded in local conditions; civic education: not reactive trainings, but longitudinal investment in political imagination—programs that teach young people how to build power, not only resist it.

Second, a movement ecosystem depends on ideological pluralism within normative alignment. It is not a coalition of convenience, but a shared terrain where actors with different strategies agree on broad horizons—anti-authoritarianism, democratic regeneration, and collective dignity. Unlike hierarchical or programmatic movements, ecosystems tolerate internal tension. What matters is not consensus, but relational coherence—the ability to coexist, communicate, and co-adapt across differences.

Third, the ecosystem must internalize care as strategy. This is a key divergence from classical paradigms that valorize confrontation and sacrifice. From an ecosystem perspective, sustainability is not a luxury; it is a condition of possibility. Burnout is not incidental—it is an infrastructural failure. Who sustains the sustainer? Who provides recovery, food, mental health, safe housing? These are not adjunct services; they are constitutive functions of ecosystemic resistance. As Berlant reminds us, care is not only affective but political: it is how life is made possible under duress.

Finally, ecosystems operate in deep political time. Unlike event-driven cycles that measure efficacy by immediacy, ecosystems embrace non-linear temporality: seasons of visibility, latency, adaptation, and regrowth. A movement does not fail because it is temporarily absent from the news cycle; it fails when it lacks the structures to metabolize loss and sustain presence across generations. As Arendt insisted, politics is about the capacity to begin—again and again. Ecosystemic resistance builds the ground from which such beginnings can recur.

In the Georgian context, this paradigm means resisting the tendency to treat protest as a peak or a test. It means organizing not for virality or confrontation alone, but for continuity. It means thinking across geographies (not just Rustaveli), across generations (not just student vanguards, GenZ or western university graduates), and across tactics (not just symbolic presence). It is a call to grow what Mouffe called agonistic spaces—but with roots, not just flash.

Ecosystems are not glamorous. They are uneven, imperfect, and slow. But they are how forests grow, how resistance lasts, and how, even under hybrid regimes, new political worlds begin to take shape.

Who Builds It?

Some might say: But we have no strong opposition, no leaders, no money.

I know that some will say: We’ve already done this. And they’re right. Much of what I’m describing—the care work, the legal defense, the memory-keeping—has already been imagined and practiced by people in Georgia, often under immense pressure and without recognition.

That may be true. But ecosystems don’t wait for perfect leaders. They begin wherever people gather: in teachers’ unions, in queer organizing circles, in student dorm rooms, in diaspora Zoom calls. They start with small questions: Can we make this safer? More sustainable? Less lonely?

In some ways, this is already happening. But these efforts are still isolated. For an ecosystem to grow, it must be interconnected. The student must know the union worker. The diaspora must support the local. The lawyer must coordinate with the medic. The movement must begin to see itself not as a wave—but as a web.

What About Parties?

Some will ask: where are the political parties in all of this?

It’s true that Georgia’s formal opposition is fragmented and often compromised. But waiting for parties to act is no longer an option. Ecosystemic protest builds the conditions under which better parties can emerge—grounded in civic trust, collective practice, and long-term imagination.

Ecosystems don’t replace institutions. They prepare society to demand and defend them.

And there’s something else—quieter, but just as corrosive: the devaluation of truth itself. In today’s Georgia, the government doesn’t only jail activists or freeze NGO bank accounts. It wages a slower campaign to undermine the very idea of shared reality. Facts become opinions. Violence is blamed on “both sides.” Journalists are accused of provoking their own assaults. Legal rulings are politicized. Whataboutism replaces accountability. Cynicism replaces outrage.

In such a climate, even the most courageous protest is easily relativized: “But aren’t they all corrupt?” “But didn’t the opposition also do that?” This is not just a political strategy. It is an epistemic attack—an attempt to make people doubt what they saw with their own eyes. And over time, it works. Trust fractures. Hope dulls. People withdraw not because they approve, but because they no longer believe anything can be known clearly, or changed collectively.

When trust in everything else collapses—parties, political leaders, institutions, courts —naming becomes anchoring. In the face of violence, relativism, and whataboutism, this kind of clarity is not naive. It is radical. And it is happening. The task now is not to invent it—but to protect it, connect it, and carry it forward.

Why Violence Serves the Regime

Some might say: This regime won’t fall with care work and networks. It will only fall with force. But violence is not a shortcut—it’s a trap. This government thrives on polarization. It lures movements into confrontation it can control, frame, and crush. It knows how to escalate, how to criminalize, how to turn the vocabulary of resistance into a justification for repression.

Meeting force with force may feel righteous. But it often leads to isolation, discredit, or despair. It pushes movements out of the realm of political imagination and into the logic of spectacle and survival—a logic the regime has already mastered.

What it cannot absorb so easily is something slower, harder to discredit, and more difficult to kill: a society that refuses to be broken, divided, or drawn into its script. Ecosystemic resistance is not passive. It is not afraid of confrontation. But it refuses self-defeating escalation. It is the refusal to become what we’re fighting. And in that refusal, it builds strength that endures.

What If We Fail?

Yes, this sounds hard. It is hard. The regime is adapting. International actors are cautious (to say the least).

For too long, Georgia’s international partners have treated democratic erosion as a diplomatic inconvenience rather than a structural collapse. The price of that indifference is being paid by those marching, documenting, and resisting without protection.

People are tired. But fatigue itself is telling us something: that the current model isn’t working. That we cannot march forever. That something must change—not just in them, but in us.

And failure? We’ve already faced it—again and again. What matters is what we do with it.

Failure can become repetition. Or it can become a rehearsal for something more durable.

A Final Word

The square is sacred in Georgia. It has carried revolutions and heartbreak, triumph and betrayal. But the square cannot carry this fight alone anymore.

What we need now is what comes after the square: schools, unions, clinics, archives, alliances, memories. The scaffold that holds up the square. The ecosystem that makes protest not only possible—but powerful.

This is not the end. It is the beginning—if we are willing to stop marching in circles and start planting roots.

I know how this might sound. At a time when protestors are arrested, beaten, surveilled, and mocked, calls to "build ecosystems" might sound like abstraction—or worse, retreat. Some might hear this as a quiet call to wait, to manage, to submit. But it is not. What I am calling for is not less resistance, but deeper resistance—not retreat, but resilience.

This is not written from distance in Lund, but from grief, solidarity, and stubborn hope. I carry Georgia not as metaphor, but as memory, as my favorite folk song, responsibility, and unfinished promise. And I write this not to dampen the fire, but to keep it alive—so it doesn’t burn out from repetition, or from always standing alone.