ABSTRACT
Following the breakup of the Soviet Union, law enforcement agencies in post-Soviet countries have had to find new ways to police urban areas. This chapter explores efforts to remake urban policing in one post-Soviet state, the Republic of Georgia. Although Georgia's police reforms are considered the most ambitious in the former Soviet Union (FSU), to date, scholars have primarily assessed their effects on levels of crime and corruption, and respect for civil rights (Bonvin 2006; Kupatadze et al. 2007; Scott 2007; Kukhianidze 2009; Burakova 2011; Kupatadze 2012). Elsewhere (Light forthcoming), I examine why Georgia undertook police reforms. This chapter, however, examines how they have reshaped day-to-day Georgian urban policing and police—citizen relations. It explores how the post-reform Georgian police, Civil Registry Agency (CRA), and other agencies are rebuilding their capacity to gather information about, and communicate with, urban residents. Overtly repressive Soviet methods of surveillance have been abolished in contemporary Georgia. Instead, advanced digitized record-keeping and new techniques of neighborhood policing are combined to create a unified system that enables the police to gather information about residents' location and activities. Such measures seek to make the city and its population legible to the state in radically changed political circumstances.
