ABSTRACT
Paramilitary violence in former Soviet republics has received very little scholarly attention. This chapter offers a detailed account of paramilitary forces in the Republic of Georgia from 1989 to 2008, with a focus on how these actors have affected the overall process of state institution building in post-independence and conflict-affected Georgia, with particular attention to the security-sector reform efforts. This chapter discusses the dynamic socio-political roles of the paramilitary in influencing the reform trajectories. The first section examines the various types of paramilitaries that existed in Georgia between 1989 and 2008, with their multi-faceted and often-conflicting roles in the political, economic, and cultural spheres, such as the paramilitary presence in the Ministry of Defense and Internal Affairs. In the next part, I take a political economy approach to analyse the paramilitary’s emergence, evolution, and/or dissolution. The analysis demonstrates that the paramilitary transformation process was driven mainly by three local factors: (a) dynamics among political elites, (b) domestic and/or regional low-intensity violent conflicts, and (c) political and economic elite interests. As I demonstrate, Georgian paramilitaries were deliberately overlooked by domestic political elites during the institutional reforms that received voluminous financial assistance from the West.
