Neal, I wanted to add a thought about social media. You point out its illusory nature, which is especially true in the bubbles of friends and followers. As you say, these do not reliably reflect the full picture.
At the same time, sm will continue to play a central role in how crises like these unfold. This is all the more worrying since good actors use the platforms more or less how they are intended, while bad actors have identified it as a demographic weakness to hack, as seen in Romania's recent elections.
I haven't seen any analysis of social media's role in recent events in Georgia — no doubt the last thing this government will do is undertake such an investigation — but one anecdotal example from my experience stands out: geo-first.com. I have seen "sponsored posts" from this source shared by individuals on my Facebook friends list.
This newish site looks like a legitimate news source but is merely propaganda outlet — more-or-less translations of Kremlin positions adapted to the Georgian context. Meanwhile, the "transparency" details provided by facebook are not helpful. They only show that posts from this "advertiser" targeted specific demographics under the guise of some organizations called "Georgia First News."
I share your dim view of Social Media. It may be little more than a delusional hobby, but it is also — however inadequate — the only space to counter kremlin narratives spreading there. I'd point to SovLab's social media feed as a good example of folk using SM right, though, no doubt, it's outmatched for shadowy organizations posting with inexhaustible financial resources.
Sure - I think social media is indeed an important battleground for influencing the public - and it's for that very reason that we should be wary of using it to make predictions. We need to keep in mind that many of the accounts we see are engaged first and foremost in influence operations (which means we should approach their claims with a base level of skepticism), and that it's extremely difficult to judge the efficacy of such operations solely by our impressions of them, because the nature of social media is that our impressions tend to amplify our own biases.
I presume many language have their own equivalent, but right now I'm thinking about the Italian expression "ci deve scappare il morto", roughly translatable as "someone has to end up dead" (it's implied it's not a desired outcome but a needed one nonetheless) and equivalent to "it takes a tragedy to spur action", highlighting the reactive, rather than proactive, nature of our systems. The Georgian situation right now really seems to have that vocation too...
I agree with 95% of the analysis. I have sent this on to various people.
I'm more optimistic, briefly, for two reasons. In my view, it is not so much "unforced errors" on the side of GD, as part of a wholesale escalation that they are on. If they were just in for maintaining power, they could have played for that easily. Instead, it is Russian law; repressive stuff all around; grabbing all institutions, from culture to pension fund to NBG; wanton violence; a terrible choice in Kavelashvili -- and I do not think this escalation will stop.
The reason that this is a problem for GD is that most of their base wants the status quo. They *don't* want radical stuff. Therein lies the difference between Gharibashvili (a Kakheti family man) and Kobakhidze (the radical cardinal).
I do not see GD stopping their aggression and escalation. What is the motive? Either a nigh-impossible list of Russian demands, or Macbethian paranoia, or a mix of the two.
If what I am saying is right (and it may well not be), the opposition parties do not need a great strategy to crack the fortress. They need a strategy of defence that is solid enough. (More on that some other time.)
One point that gets overlooked. I believe that military planners in Russia recognize that if they invade, they may well lose the entire war.
At that point, a good chunk of GD supporters who are with GD because they want to keep a bad peace would switch. (Yes, some are there because they are 100% pro Kremlin, but this is not the full story. Every opposition supporter knows family members or friends who are still with GD who are not full-on pro-Russian. Even with BI, to me the most plausible account is that he loathes VVP but believes that he better accommodate his demands.) So there would be a mass strike, possibly an insurrection, and if Russia needs to borrow soldiers from North Korea to deal with the Kursk incursion, I am not sure where they will take forces from to hold down a restive country.
Without losing ourselves in military speculation, just for historic precedent: the Prague Spring was crushed with more than 150.000 Warsaw Pact troops. CZ at the time had five times the population that Georgia has now, and was twice the size. Whatever you conclude about that numerical comparison, military planners in Moscow will not assume that flying in a batallion (i.e. few hundred) paratroopers to Tbilisi can do the job. Chechen militias? That may be an option, but it would galvanize the resistance.
No one in their right mind wants to take big risks at a turbulent point, so there is something unsavoury to any such analysis. But it matters as geopolitics is actually more favorable than it looks if you reduce it to the Q whether the West will ride to the rescue. (It will not.)
Again, I agree with almost all the analysis and think that a sensible strategy needs to start from taking your sober assessment very seriously.
We are doomed only if we ignore what you have been writing.
About Russia - Putin is very hard to predict, and "Putin is too shrewd to send troops into a conflict he knows he'd lose" was what analysts were saying the day before he invaded Ukraine, so I think we do have some reason to be concerned about how he would respond to an attempt at regime change here. But also, in this case what we think is likely isn't as important as what the average Georgian fears will happen, and my concern is that the opposition might be holding back because they fear Russian intervention even if it's not within Russia's capacity to secure victory here.
About Georgian Dream - as long as they escalate slowly enough, each escalation hurts the opposition more than it hurts them. That's why I think Kobakhidze's announcement was a mistake - if he'd said "we're moving steadily towards EU integration and everything is on track" and then pursued the exact same policies, we wouldn't be seeing protests on this scale. I still say he made that announcement because he felt he had to save face after EU countries said Georgia's accession was on hold. And if you look at opposition media, now they're reporting that Kavelashvili is saying that EU integration is on track, they're making steady progress, and they'll be ready to join by 2030, so I think they're trying to somehow walk back or ameliorate Kobakhidze's statement. That's the message their supporters are getting, anyway - I saw an interview with a GD supporter who said "we're still going to Europe, it's just going to take a bit more time". Meanwhile the opposition is targeted with increasingly draconian laws criminalizing protest, and a purge of government employees who oppose the regime, and I think on the margins that's going to scare more people away from protests than it will bring in.
They are all a bunch of hotheads, so it's of course possible they'll overstep. And with each use of violence there's an inherent risk that it goes too far - that the police hit someone a bit too hard, or some people get killed in the chaos (as happened when protesters were hit by a police car at a protest during Misha's time) - so I'm not discounting the possibility that they'll escalate too much too soon. But even in that case, it puts us in the revolutionary violence scenario, not any kind of peaceful transfer of power, and I don't think that's a scenario most Georgians want to be in.
Society may require a leader, but the opposition is resistant to one. In Georgia, there is little opportunity for new individuals to form a political party. If a serious leader were to emerge, they would likely be viewed as competition rather than an opportunity for collaboration.
I have some family obligations keeping me here for now, although in an emergency I guess we could leave. But I expect stability and slowly declining conditions, rather than upheaval, and to be honest, given my personal circumstances, I'm well-positioned to weather slowly declining conditions.
Very sober and independently-minded take. Thanks for this.
Neal, I wanted to add a thought about social media. You point out its illusory nature, which is especially true in the bubbles of friends and followers. As you say, these do not reliably reflect the full picture.
At the same time, sm will continue to play a central role in how crises like these unfold. This is all the more worrying since good actors use the platforms more or less how they are intended, while bad actors have identified it as a demographic weakness to hack, as seen in Romania's recent elections.
I haven't seen any analysis of social media's role in recent events in Georgia — no doubt the last thing this government will do is undertake such an investigation — but one anecdotal example from my experience stands out: geo-first.com. I have seen "sponsored posts" from this source shared by individuals on my Facebook friends list.
This newish site looks like a legitimate news source but is merely propaganda outlet — more-or-less translations of Kremlin positions adapted to the Georgian context. Meanwhile, the "transparency" details provided by facebook are not helpful. They only show that posts from this "advertiser" targeted specific demographics under the guise of some organizations called "Georgia First News."
I share your dim view of Social Media. It may be little more than a delusional hobby, but it is also — however inadequate — the only space to counter kremlin narratives spreading there. I'd point to SovLab's social media feed as a good example of folk using SM right, though, no doubt, it's outmatched for shadowy organizations posting with inexhaustible financial resources.
Sure - I think social media is indeed an important battleground for influencing the public - and it's for that very reason that we should be wary of using it to make predictions. We need to keep in mind that many of the accounts we see are engaged first and foremost in influence operations (which means we should approach their claims with a base level of skepticism), and that it's extremely difficult to judge the efficacy of such operations solely by our impressions of them, because the nature of social media is that our impressions tend to amplify our own biases.
I presume many language have their own equivalent, but right now I'm thinking about the Italian expression "ci deve scappare il morto", roughly translatable as "someone has to end up dead" (it's implied it's not a desired outcome but a needed one nonetheless) and equivalent to "it takes a tragedy to spur action", highlighting the reactive, rather than proactive, nature of our systems. The Georgian situation right now really seems to have that vocation too...
I agree with 95% of the analysis. I have sent this on to various people.
I'm more optimistic, briefly, for two reasons. In my view, it is not so much "unforced errors" on the side of GD, as part of a wholesale escalation that they are on. If they were just in for maintaining power, they could have played for that easily. Instead, it is Russian law; repressive stuff all around; grabbing all institutions, from culture to pension fund to NBG; wanton violence; a terrible choice in Kavelashvili -- and I do not think this escalation will stop.
The reason that this is a problem for GD is that most of their base wants the status quo. They *don't* want radical stuff. Therein lies the difference between Gharibashvili (a Kakheti family man) and Kobakhidze (the radical cardinal).
I do not see GD stopping their aggression and escalation. What is the motive? Either a nigh-impossible list of Russian demands, or Macbethian paranoia, or a mix of the two.
If what I am saying is right (and it may well not be), the opposition parties do not need a great strategy to crack the fortress. They need a strategy of defence that is solid enough. (More on that some other time.)
One point that gets overlooked. I believe that military planners in Russia recognize that if they invade, they may well lose the entire war.
At that point, a good chunk of GD supporters who are with GD because they want to keep a bad peace would switch. (Yes, some are there because they are 100% pro Kremlin, but this is not the full story. Every opposition supporter knows family members or friends who are still with GD who are not full-on pro-Russian. Even with BI, to me the most plausible account is that he loathes VVP but believes that he better accommodate his demands.) So there would be a mass strike, possibly an insurrection, and if Russia needs to borrow soldiers from North Korea to deal with the Kursk incursion, I am not sure where they will take forces from to hold down a restive country.
Without losing ourselves in military speculation, just for historic precedent: the Prague Spring was crushed with more than 150.000 Warsaw Pact troops. CZ at the time had five times the population that Georgia has now, and was twice the size. Whatever you conclude about that numerical comparison, military planners in Moscow will not assume that flying in a batallion (i.e. few hundred) paratroopers to Tbilisi can do the job. Chechen militias? That may be an option, but it would galvanize the resistance.
No one in their right mind wants to take big risks at a turbulent point, so there is something unsavoury to any such analysis. But it matters as geopolitics is actually more favorable than it looks if you reduce it to the Q whether the West will ride to the rescue. (It will not.)
Again, I agree with almost all the analysis and think that a sensible strategy needs to start from taking your sober assessment very seriously.
We are doomed only if we ignore what you have been writing.
Thanks for sharing!
About Russia - Putin is very hard to predict, and "Putin is too shrewd to send troops into a conflict he knows he'd lose" was what analysts were saying the day before he invaded Ukraine, so I think we do have some reason to be concerned about how he would respond to an attempt at regime change here. But also, in this case what we think is likely isn't as important as what the average Georgian fears will happen, and my concern is that the opposition might be holding back because they fear Russian intervention even if it's not within Russia's capacity to secure victory here.
About Georgian Dream - as long as they escalate slowly enough, each escalation hurts the opposition more than it hurts them. That's why I think Kobakhidze's announcement was a mistake - if he'd said "we're moving steadily towards EU integration and everything is on track" and then pursued the exact same policies, we wouldn't be seeing protests on this scale. I still say he made that announcement because he felt he had to save face after EU countries said Georgia's accession was on hold. And if you look at opposition media, now they're reporting that Kavelashvili is saying that EU integration is on track, they're making steady progress, and they'll be ready to join by 2030, so I think they're trying to somehow walk back or ameliorate Kobakhidze's statement. That's the message their supporters are getting, anyway - I saw an interview with a GD supporter who said "we're still going to Europe, it's just going to take a bit more time". Meanwhile the opposition is targeted with increasingly draconian laws criminalizing protest, and a purge of government employees who oppose the regime, and I think on the margins that's going to scare more people away from protests than it will bring in.
They are all a bunch of hotheads, so it's of course possible they'll overstep. And with each use of violence there's an inherent risk that it goes too far - that the police hit someone a bit too hard, or some people get killed in the chaos (as happened when protesters were hit by a police car at a protest during Misha's time) - so I'm not discounting the possibility that they'll escalate too much too soon. But even in that case, it puts us in the revolutionary violence scenario, not any kind of peaceful transfer of power, and I don't think that's a scenario most Georgians want to be in.
Society may require a leader, but the opposition is resistant to one. In Georgia, there is little opportunity for new individuals to form a political party. If a serious leader were to emerge, they would likely be viewed as competition rather than an opportunity for collaboration.
Speaking of brain drain, are you thinking of sticking around or is it time for you to bail?
I have some family obligations keeping me here for now, although in an emergency I guess we could leave. But I expect stability and slowly declining conditions, rather than upheaval, and to be honest, given my personal circumstances, I'm well-positioned to weather slowly declining conditions.