Registan’s Georgia News & Analysis Archive

Georgia splintered after declaring independence from the Soviet Union. Abkhazia, Adjara, and South Ossetia all operated independently from Tbilisi for over a decade. In 2003, popular protests ousted President Eduard Sheverdnadze and led to Mikheil Saakashvili. A bold and often brash, young leader, Saakashvili engaged in massive reform of the Georgian government, regained control over Adjara, and attracted foreign investors. In 2008, Russia went to war with Georgia briefly to prevent Tbilisi from regaining control of South Ossetia, and though the war resulted in major damage to Georgian infrastructure and concerns over its safety for investments, it has regained its economic momentum and has slowly worked to improve relations with Russia via closer economic links.

Several Registan authors and members of its network of experts have lived, worked, and studied in Georgia and have between them decades of experience in academia, government, and private industry dealing with topics related to Georgia. We use that experience and expertise to report on, contextualize, and analyze current events in Georgia. Registan puts that experience to work to offer research, analysis, and training services tailored to your individual needs. For more information on how we can help you and your organization better understand Georgia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, visit our services page.

Photo credit: Flickr user miss_rubov

The Meta-War in Georgia, One Year On

by Joshua Foust
Thumbnail image for The Meta-War in Georgia, One Year On

I have a new article in the Columbia Journalism Review today, looking at how the media is covering the aftermath of the Russo-Georgian War of last year. A brief snippet: That doesn’t mean the meta-war over Georgia and Russia has ended. It is to say that Georgia has a big advantage in the English-language press [...]

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Georgia Publicly Debates Its Future

by Joshua Foust

Irakli Alasania, the leader of the Our Georgia-Free Democrats party, has quite an interesting op-ed in the Wall Street Journal: Most people will be familiar with the threat Georgia faces from its Russian neighbor. But Georgian society also faces massive internal challenges to its democracy and economy. We need to get past our confrontational politics [...]

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Michael Cecire on Moral Equivalence

by Joshua Foust

Michael J. Totten—remember him?—has a guest author, a former PCV no less, discussing the recent rioting in Georgia. The events swirling within Iran have been nothing short of startling, taking the world by surprise by its speed and intensity. Perhaps it’s testament to the Army of Davids globalization schema that, for weeks, the top two [...]

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Keeping an Eye Out for Georgia

by Joshua Foust

The International Crisis Group just released a new study on Georgia: All sides in the conflict – Georgian, Russian and South Ossetian – committed war-time abuses, but the actions of Ossetian militias, who systematically looted, torched and in some cases bulldozed most ethnic Georgian villages, were particularly egregious. The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of [...]

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Keeping Up With Georgia, Or the Problems with Revolution Fatigue

by Joshua Foust

There is plenty of commentary on Iran out there. You don’t need us to fill you in (though we might try a bit later, from an altitude above the twitter-RTing that’s currently 90% of the “news” about the “revolution”). What I do find remarkable about what’s going on right now remains what’s going on in [...]

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Iran Isn’t the Only Country Rioting

by Joshua Foust

While all the focus is on Iran’s street riots over a possibly-rigged election, let us turn our attention to U.S. ally The Republic of Georgia. Georgia, if you recall, was embroiled in a nasty little border war with Russia this past August, and was pretty successful in pinning much of the blame on Russia’s “aggression.” [...]

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Chisinau, Tbilisi, The Masseuse & Her Blog

by Nathan Hamm

Plenty of well-deserved attention is being paid to the goings-on on in Moldova. (I recommend the fantastic Scraps of Moscow for plenty of news and analysis on the situation.) Meanwhile, the conflict between the opposition and the government continues to simmer in Georgia. Considering the ways in which storming the halls of power seems to [...]

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Remember that whole Russia-Georgia thing?

by Joshua Foust

I still don’t get the strategic calculus behind this one: The United States and Georgia officially became “strategic partners” under a charter signed by the two governments on January 9. While Georgian officials are hailing the document as a guarantee of Washington’s support for Tbilisi, analysts are divided on what kind of impact the agreement [...]

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Questioning Georgia

by Joshua Foust

Remember when I said Mark Ames was being too hard on CJ Chivers over his coverage of the Georgian conflict? Well. Newly available accounts by independent military observers of the beginning of the war between Georgia and Russia this summer call into question the longstanding Georgian assertion that it was acting defensively against separatist and [...]

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Georgia Is No Lamb, but Neither Are Journalists

by Joshua Foust

Mark Ames—yes, the same guy who used to run the much-lamented Exile—has something to say about how the media covered the Russo-Georgian war of last August. The real question, then, is why the Times waited until this late to question its own position–why wait until the war was long off the front pages, to publish [...]

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