On January 23, 2026, the Tbilisi City Court sentenced five activists to administrative arrest for protesting on the sidewalk. I take this moment as an ethnographic entry point into a longer, historically layered field of urban and territorial protest in Georgia, shaped by post- socialist transformation, neoliberal development, and the escalating securitisation of everyday life.
Drawing on long-term qualitative research on urban protest, this paper situates earlier mobilisations around public space, heritage, and urban development within regimes of informal governance and selective institutional responsiveness. During this period, protest was often managed through negotiation, legal ambiguity, and symbolic accommodation, allowing protest to persist while shielding major development interests from popular accountability.
Placing these struggles in dialogue with more recent protest cycles – environmental mobilisations against extractive infrastructure, labour protests in mono-industrial settings, grassroots resistance to territorial commodification, and sustained post-election protests – I trace a marked shift in the state’s approach to political contestation, as protest is increasingly framed as a security problem rather than a political claim. New legal frameworks narrow lawful assembly, policing intensifies, surveillance infrastructures expand, and public order and national security dominate state–citizen encounters, reconfiguring urban and territorial space today.
By attending to how protest travels across spaces and scales, the paper offers an anthropological perspective on how inequality, political participation, and securitisation are lived and contested through space in contemporary Georgia.
Esma Berikishvili holds a PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology from Ilia State University and a master’s degree in Sociology and Social Anthropology from Central European University (CEU). Her doctoral dissertation, “The City of Eternal Promises: The Affect of Lost Infrastructure and Informal Maritime Economic Practices in the Port City of Poti, Georgia,” examines how infrastructural transformations shape everyday life and local economies in post-socialist contexts. Esma has collaborated with various academic and research organisations, and her work engages with questions of urban change, subcultures, and social movements in Georgia. Her research interests include urban anthropology, activism, informal and everyday economic practices, the Black Sea region, and visual anthropology.