Neither Breakthrough nor Suppression: Explaining Stalemate in Georgia’s 2024–2026 Protests

Abstract

Existing scholarship on post-Soviet anti-government protests often explains protest trajectories through the binary outcomes of success or failure but pays less attention to why some protests become prolonged instead of quickly succeeding or being suppressed. To address this gap, this thesis argues that such cases can be better understood through the concept of attritional stalemate. Focusing on one of the most recent cases of prolonged protest in the region, Georgia’s 2024-2026 anti-government protests, in which neither the government nor protesters have been able to achieve a decisive outcome, the thesis explains how and why the Georgian protests evolved into a stalemate. Using process tracing as its primary methodology, the thesis analyzes the interaction among protest mobilization, opposition fragmentation, calibrated repression, security-elite cohesion, and international reaction throughout the two protest waves.The study finds that Georgia’s protest cycle evolved into an attritional stalemate because enabling and constraining factors on both sides interacted to prevent either breakthrough or full suppression. Protesters sustained mobilization and international visibility, but opposition fragmentation limited their ability to convert pressure into a political breakthrough. At the same time, Georgian Dream used calibrated repression and maintained security-elite cohesion, constraining protest without fully eliminating it. Both the protest movement and the state were also able to impose costs on each other while also finding ways to offset those costs. The thesis, therefore, shows that protest stalemate should be understood not simply as a delayed failure but as a distinct analytical category of contentious politics.