Author: M. Ghahremani, Member of the Caucasus Studies Group
Introduction
Georgia’s current domestic crisis cannot be treated simply as a conventional drift toward authoritarianism or a routine departure from liberal democratic norms. The restrictions imposed on civil society, legislation targeting foreign influence, and the dispersal of public demonstrations represent only the visible manifestations of a deeper systemic dilemma. Underlying these developments is a broader, more entrenched structural dynamic: the progressive constriction of Georgia’s strategic room for maneuver. This constraint stems from the ongoing military occupation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the absence of binding Western security guarantees, and the corridor politics that increasingly involve Turkey, Azerbaijan, and China. Consequently, domestic legal and political controversies in Georgia have repeatedly metastasized into foundational disputes over national sovereignty and foreign policy alignment. The fundamental question is why this trajectory has intensified precisely when Georgia’s geopolitical value for regional connectivity and transit corridors is ascending rather than declining [1, 2, 3].
Developments this year have rendered this paradox increasingly acute. In June, the World Bank approved a $372 million loan for Georgia’s transport sector, while U.S. development financing continued to support the expansion of the Port of Poti, operated by the PACE Group. By September, however, European institutions were once again issuing stark warnings over the shrinking space for civil society in Georgia. Capital inflows and political trajectories have thus moved in opposing directions. The ruling Georgian Dream party may present this divergence as evidence that the state can pursue an assertive, independent foreign policy while continuing to attract foreign capital. Yet this situation raises a more fundamental structural question: does a country’s mounting strategic significance to external powers grant it greater latitude over its domestic political trajectory, or does it, conversely, circumscribe its range of viable choices? [4, 5, 1]
This article introduces the concept of the “Neo-Mackinderian Trap” to elucidate why Georgian domestic politics is repeatedly contested along three intersecting geopolitical axes: national sovereignty, foreign alignment, and the institutional character of the political regime. The argument proceeds on two analytical levels. First, the constriction of civic space functions to consolidate incumbent domestic political control. Second, geography, protracted territorial occupation, and corridor interdependence severely delimit the strategic alternatives available to the ruling elite, driving them to vacillate between Western integration and strategic hedging. These structural pressures explain why political crises recur systematically in Georgia; nevertheless, they render political repression neither historically inevitable nor absolve political leaders of agency and accountability.
The Mackinder Trap and Georgia’s Geographical Position
Halford Mackinder grounded his analysis of Eurasian power dynamics in a straightforward yet profound relationship between geography, transport infrastructure, and great-power competition. In his formulation, infrastructural development fundamentally reallocates the strategic and political weight of continental space. Strictly speaking, Georgia does not lie within Mackinder’s “Heartland.” Rather than occupying the core of the Eurasian landmass, its significance derives from its position along southern trans-Eurasian corridors, serving as the terrestrial conduit where continental overland transport networks converge upon the Black Sea. Contemporary contributions by Tim Marshall on geographic determinism offer a modernized vocabulary for analyzing these constraints. Marshall, however, provides an accessible primer on the geopolitical imperatives of terrain rather than a formalized theoretical framework capable of supplanting Mackinder. The intersection of these two perspectives can be conceptualized as a “Mackinder–Marshall continuum”: a heuristic lens for assessing structural vulnerabilities rather than a deterministic theory of Georgian politics [6, 7].
The formulation of the “Neo-Mackinderian Trap” is not intended to displace mainstream international relations theories. Instead, it traces the causal mechanisms through which external structural pressures are translated into domestic institutional transformations. Any state situated along a contested transit corridor and positioned adjacent to a coercive great power faces persistent external coercion—particularly when its security guarantees remain ambiguous and its primary economic arteries rely on infrastructure beyond its sovereign control. In Georgia’s case, geographic proximity to the Russian Federation and enduring territorial occupation heighten elite sensitivity to acute security risks. Concurrently, Western political conditionality can be framed domestically by the ruling elite as an infringement upon national sovereignty. The operative analytical question is therefore not whether external pressure exists, but how Georgian decision-makers manage it: whether by cultivating resilient domestic institutions capable of absorbing external shocks, or by circumscribing the political space of actors who contest the government’s decisions.
The theoretical contribution of this article focuses on the recurrent feedback loop between external structural pressure and domestic political sclerosis. When a state’s foreign policy alignment is subject to perpetual contestation, political opposition is easily delegitimized as an instrument of foreign geopolitical maneuvering, while civil society is securitized by the state apparatus as an internal vulnerability. Under these conditions, the polity enters a cyclical dynamic: legislative restrictions, societal mobilization, state repression, international condemnation, and compensatory strategic hedging—a cycle that continually reproduces itself. This framework serves as a testable hypothesis rather than an exhaustive explanation for state behavior. Furthermore, genuine strategic autonomy must be evaluated by rigorous operational criteria: the institutional capacity to reject disadvantageous agreements, the administrative competence to execute agreements once concluded, and the flexibility to adjust policies when structural conditions shift. An expansion of executive prerogatives does not automatically translate into strategic autonomy at the state level.
The Middle Corridor and the Expansion of Georgian Connectivity
The “Middle Corridor”—formally designated as the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route (TITR)—links European and Asian markets across the Caspian Sea and the South Caucasus. The strategic appeal of this multimodal route is clear: it bypasses Russian territory entirely. Nevertheless, its commercial viability depends on complex multilateral coordination, as freight must transition across disparate national railway networks, maritime shipping lines, seaport terminals, and divergent customs regimes. Consequently, substantial domestic infrastructure improvements within Georgia cannot single-handedly offset bottlenecks that emerge along other segments of the transit chain. A 2023 World Bank assessment projected that with targeted capital investments and coordinated policy reforms, freight volumes along the corridor could triple by 2030 while transit times could be halved. However, this projection was explicitly conditional, contingent largely on the growth of intra-regional trade among Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Georgia [8].
Recent infrastructure initiatives have brought this latent throughput closer to realization. Official reports indicated that the modernized Baku–Tbilisi–Kars (BTK) railway entered full operation in June 2026, expanding its annual throughput capacity from 1 million to 5 million metric tons. Similarly, the Georgian Railway modernization project, completed in December 2025, reportedly increased network capacity from 27 million to 48 million tons annually. These metrics require careful analytical interpretation: they measure nominal infrastructural throughput rather than actual cargo volumes transported, nor can they be aggregated to represent the total capacity of the multimodal corridor. What these indicators substantiate is that the physical prerequisites for elevated trade volumes are being assembled. Whether this expanded capacity is commercially utilized remains dependent on service reliability, tariff structures, and operational competitiveness [9, 10].
Corridor interdependence with Turkey and Azerbaijan exerts a decisive influence on Georgia’s domestic political economy and external diplomacy. While this interdependence elevates Tbilisi’s strategic leverage, it simultaneously locks the country into a regional matrix in which neighboring states’ preferences carry real structural weight. Kazakhstan seeks reliable access to external export markets; Azerbaijan benefits from expanding westward transit connections; and Turkey aims to consolidate its logistical bridge into the South Caucasus and Central Asia. Although these interests overlap with those of Georgia, they are not identical. Each regional actor maintains autonomous incentives to minimize tariff burdens and explore alternative routing. Transit revenues undoubtedly stimulate Georgia’s economic development, but integration into shared regional infrastructure does not guarantee permanent preferential terms.
European Integration and Domestic Political Developments
The West’s institutional engagement with Georgia has consistently rested on two pillars: economic opportunity paired with conditional integration, accompanied by strictly circumscribed security commitments. Georgia was granted European Union candidate status in December 2023, but its accession trajectory stalled de facto in 2024. The Georgian government subsequently announced that it would suspend opening accession negotiations until 2028. Nonetheless, the EU–Georgia Association Agreement and its Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area (DCFTA) remain legally operative, sustaining a crucial economic lifeline. Yet institutional association is fundamentally distinct from an active accession process. In effect, Georgia’s geopolitical orientation remains conditional and structurally reversible [11].
This diplomatic deterioration continued to attract international scrutiny into 2026. The European Union’s human rights report released in August, assessing the preceding year, highlighted severe constraints on civil liberties and the erosion of institutional checks and balances. In March, the EU suspended visa-free travel for holders of Georgian diplomatic, service, and official passports for a twelve-month period—a targeted measure that did not disrupt the broader visa-free regime for ordinary Georgian citizens. Subsequently, on September 8, a cross-regional coalition of 34 states delivered a joint statement at the United Nations Human Rights Council voicing serious concern over restrictive legislative measures and the treatment of demonstrators and opposition figures. This intervention represented a joint diplomatic statement rather than a formal resolution adopted by the UNHRC itself [12, 13, 14]
The domestic contestation surrounding foreign influence legislation provides perhaps the clearest manifestation of the Neo-Mackinderian Trap. The 2024 Law on Transparency of Foreign Influence, which introduced a 20 percent foreign funding threshold for non-governmental organizations, is distinct from the Foreign Agents Registration Act adopted in April 2025 and enacted one month later. The 2025 statute targets natural and legal persons operating on behalf of a “foreign principal,” with both legal frameworks operating concurrently within Georgia’s statutory code. In a third-party intervention on September 8, 2026, the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights submitted that this revised framework poses acute hazards to civil society. This submission was made as an amicus curiae intervention before the European Court of Human Rights and does not constitute a final judgment of the Court [1].
Legislative enactment did not defuse political conflict. Following the disputed October 2024 parliamentary elections, the government’s announcement on November 28 regarding the suspension of EU accession talks catalyzed an intense wave of public demonstrations. Since then, regulatory constraints and civic mobilization have become inextricably bound up with Georgia’s foreign policy orientation [15].
At the same time, certain elements of the government’s rationale warrant objective analytical scrutiny. States possess legitimate sovereign interests in financial transparency, and entities operating on foreign grants cannot claim blanket exemption from regulatory oversight. Receipt of external financing, however, is not inherently synonymous with external command and control. Conversely, Western insistence on unhindered civil society operations can function as an instrument of soft-power projection if institutional boundaries remain blurred, establishing this dynamic as a focal point of geopolitical friction. In the author’s assessment, if Georgia completely abandons its balancing posture between Russia and the West, it risks forfeiting vital components of its sovereign autonomy over the long term, even as it invokes national sovereignty in the short term through foreign agent registration laws.
Russia and the Limits of a “Sovereignty-Centered” Posture
Russia represents the most acute, immediate constraint on Georgian sovereignty, as its territorial occupation is backed by active coercive military capabilities. The fact that the unarmed European Union Monitoring Mission (EUMM) remains barred from entering Abkhazia and South Ossetia underscores the structural limitations of existing conflict-management mechanisms. Nevertheless, pragmatic low-level engagement persists. At the 134th Incident Prevention and Response Mechanism (IPRM) meeting in Ergneti on September 8, 2026, international co-facilitators welcomed the increased frequency of crossing-point openings along the administrative boundary line, while recording ongoing restrictions on freedom of movement and civilian detentions. While such practical arrangements alleviate humanitarian strains for conflict-affected communities, they do not resolve the structural reality of military occupation [2, 16].
The broader strategic posture of the Georgian Dream government must be evaluated against this geopolitical baseline. NATO’s 2008 Bucharest Summit declaration—promising future membership without concrete collective defense mechanisms or a Membership Action Plan (MAP)—never extended Article 5 security guarantees to Georgia. Consequently, a government that seeks to avert direct confrontation with Moscow while diversifying inward investment is responding to an objective security dilemma rather than an imagined vulnerability. Furthermore, preliminary estimates from the National Statistics Office of Georgia (Geostat) indicating an 8 percent year-on-year GDP expansion in July 2026 challenge the simplistic assumption that political friction with the West must precipitate immediate macroeconomic collapse [3, 17].
The fundamental vulnerability, however, is that short-term economic stability does not guarantee structural resilience. Aggregate growth metrics fail to demonstrate how the Georgian economy would withstand severe, coordinated disruptions in trade, capital flows, or regional security. Western sanctions mechanisms introduce an additional layer of economic vulnerability. The European Union’s 21st sanctions package adopted on July 23, 2026, incorporated a transactional prohibition targeting the Kulevi oil refinery, accompanied by a six-month implementation grace period. Although Georgia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs contested the empirical grounds for this measure, the sanction specifically targeted the designated asset rather than the broader Georgian economy. Furthermore, given the six-month deferral, the measure remained prospective at the time of writing. Nevertheless, this episode illustrates a critical reality: commercial arteries remain acutely susceptible to extraterritorial regulatory actions, regardless of how meticulously a state calibrates its geopolitical posture [18, 19].
Western engagement itself is far more nuanced than rhetoric of zero-sum geopolitical confrontation suggests. While Washington designated Bidzina Ivanishvili, the founder of Georgian Dream, under targeted sanctions in December 2024, U.S. bilateral development financing continued to support maritime expansion projects at the Port of Poti well into 2026. Commercial cooperation can thus persist amidst acute diplomatic ruptures. The definitive test of the government’s strategy is therefore not whether it can sustain cross-border trade with competing powers simultaneously, but whether viable, operational alternatives remain open to Georgia when systemic pressure escalates [20, 5].
China and the Evolution of the Anaklia Deep Sea Port
The People’s Republic of China provides an additional dimension for Georgia’s external diversification. In June 2026, bilateral ties were elevated to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. Furthermore, preliminary second-quarter data from Geostat indicated that China accounted for $219.5 million, or 46.8 percent, of total foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows into Georgia. This represents a tangible and unprecedented surge in capital deployment. However, gross FDI figures alone do not demonstrate structural economic capture, nor do aggregate balance-of-payments statistics specify the sector-level allocation of these investments. Moreover, an elevated diplomatic partnership must not be conflated with sovereign security guarantees; they belong to entirely distinct categories of state interaction [21, 22].
The Anaklia Deep Sea Port project epitomizes this distinction. In July 2026, the Georgian government announced that the development of the deep-water port would proceed under a state-owned enterprise model utilizing a “landlord port” governance structure, following the conclusion of negotiations with the China Communications Construction Company (CCCC) consortium without a finalized concession agreement. Consequently, characterizing the preceding procurement phase as an outright Chinese takeover of the port would be empirically inaccurate. Maritime construction operations proceeded, alongside exploratory discussions concerning potential World Bank institutional involvement. Target operations for the first commercial vessel calls are slated for 2029—indicating that the project remains under active development, neither fully capitalized nor commercially operational [23, 24].
In this respect, Anaklia embodies an infrastructural paradox. While expanding the carrying capacity of the Middle Corridor mitigates Georgia’s vulnerability to existing supply bottlenecks, the underlying financing architecture, investor selection, and operational concessions can generate novel strategic liabilities. A strategy devised to circumvent one structural dependency may inadvertently generate another. Conversely, Georgia’s restructuring of the development model demonstrates that the state retains the agency to withdraw from complex international negotiations, proving that dependency is not preordained. State ownership, however, should not be conflated with strategic autonomy. Sovereign resilience depends on debt covenant conditions, competitive procurement standards, and operational terminal arrangements. Domestic governance credibility and geopolitical risk mitigation are inextricably linked.
Armenia and the Future of Georgia’s Transit Advantage
The potential unblocking of regional transit routes through Armenia could recalibrate Georgia’s transit monopoly and bargaining leverage. The U.S.-backed initiative designated as the “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity” (TRIPP) envisions transport corridors across Armenian sovereign territory linking mainland Azerbaijan to Nakhchivan, with subsequent connectivity into Turkey. The conceptual framework explicitly respects Armenian sovereign jurisdiction. Were this route to become operational, it could dilute the comparative advantage Georgia has derived from the protracted closure of alternative regional borders. However, a nascent diplomatic framework is not equivalent to an operational railway network [25].
Diplomatic engagements across August and September lent momentum to this connectivity agenda. Officials from Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the United States convened in Washington on August 10 to discuss cross-border infrastructural cooperation. On September 1, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan met with U.S. Senator Steve Daines to consult on project implementation, followed on September 4 by an EU-supported Armenia–Turkey business conference convened in Yerevan to explore cross-border trade facilitation. These diplomatic overtures confirm sustained regional dialogue, but they do not signify completed capital works or demilitarized frontiers. Commercial viability remains contingent on capital mobilization, robust security regimes, and competitive tariff frameworks [26, 27, 28].
The structural implications of these developments for Georgia are twofold. Azerbaijan would acquire an alternative overland route into Turkey, while Armenia would diminish its structural dependence on its northern transit corridors through Georgia. Nevertheless, southern transit routes will not automatically siphon freight traffic away from Georgia’s Black Sea ports. An overall expansion of trans-Eurasian trade could generate positive commercial spillover effects for the Georgian economy, while redundant network routing enhances the systemic resilience of the Middle Corridor against regional disruptions. Regional normalization might therefore yield net economic dividends for Georgia while eroding the geopolitical leverage derived from its monopoly position. Comprehensive regional peace does not inherently undermine Georgia, but it obsolesces any national strategy predicated upon the geographical isolation of its neighbors and the absence of transit alternatives.
Conclusion
Georgia’s multidimensional crisis must be understood as the joint product of domestic institutional vulnerabilities and external patronage of competing domestic political factions. Contemporary developments substantiate the central paradox of this analysis: strategic capital investments in transport connectivity and international interest in Georgian infrastructure can expand concurrently with the degradation of Tbilisi’s political relations with the West. This dynamic does not imply that enhanced connectivity inherently erodes national autonomy. Continued Western multilateral financing alongside the restructuring of the Anaklia port model demonstrate that Georgia retains diplomatic and commercial options. Crucially, however, the state’s capacity to leverage these options depends upon the integrity of its domestic governance institutions and the volatility of its immediate security environment.
The Neo-Mackinderian Trap conceptualizes a recurring political feedback loop rather than a deterministic geographical destiny. External security vulnerabilities incentivize the governing elite to restrict domestic civic space; this internal illiberal turn damages relations with Western partners, thereby creating structural incentives for compensatory geopolitical hedging. Simultaneously, the prospective reactivation of transit routes through Armenia dismantles the long-standing assumption that Georgia’s transit bottleneck status guarantees perpetual geopolitical leverage. The future trajectory of Georgia’s democratic consolidation and strategic autonomy will ultimately hinge on its institutional capacity to absorb and adapt to external pressures emanating from both Russia and the West.
Georgia’s geopolitical significance is not in dispute. The central dilemma is whether this structural significance will expand strategic room for maneuver for its citizens and future governments, or circumscribe it. The answer will depend on the regulatory and financial terms of Georgia’s international agreements, the reliability of its transport infrastructure, and the capacity of its domestic institutions to identify and recalibrate disadvantageous policies before transient geopolitical advantages crystallize into permanent structural constraints.
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