Authors

Discussion

This article is part of the ERC project: Anger, legitimised: Amplified anger and its rhetorics of legitimation in the 21st century (ANGLE). It focuses on developing understanding around a multitude of forms of anger across contemporary society. This branch of the project is focused on exploring post-imperial anger in Georgia towards Russia. This article will contribute to understanding of the breadth of different forms of anger across Georgia and how understandings and memories of Russia influence such emotion. 

Specifically, this article explores the concepts of remembered anger and anger at imagined futures in the cases of the Rioni Protectors movement and pro-European protests in Tbilisi. As such, this paper illustrates how anger towards Russia and the legacy of the USSR manifests similarly and differently in rural and urban based protest movements.

The rural urban divide is an important point to engage with in the study of anger and post-imperial relations in Georgia. This is because the manifestation of such anger and relations differs in each location. Urban (Tbilisi) anger towards Russia is largely connected to understandings of its role in interfering with Georgia’s politics and hindering its ambitions to obtaining greater European integration. However, in more rural environments anger towards Russia is grounded in understandings of fear (fear of invasion, fear of foreign control) rather than in the political and moral values that are associated with Russia and its imperial legacy in more urban environments. It is, broadly speaking, a social issue in urban environments and a historical issue in regional locations. Such a gap creates a resistance environment where disunity across settings is commonplace and easily exploited in many instances.