Georgia’s Liminal Identity or the Never-ending Stage of Transition

The following research project tries to uncover the origin of Georgian society's insecurity about its positioning in the East/West discourse and how such positioning is employed by the two competing narratives in the processes of identity production. This stage of transition, being neither here nor there, is conceptualized as liminality and an attempt is made to illustrate how various interest groups inside the state (liberals and populists in this case) make the use of such positioning. At the same time, it is argued that the transition processes of such states will always remain half complete, leaving them in the permanent state of liminality and at the same time reproducing the Western superiority. The following study is also looking at how two contradicting discourses produce and reproduce different identities, such as European/Western versus Eastern/Caucasian/non-European and how these discourses shape foreign policy goals? These tension between identity and foreign policy goals became especially apparent with the NATO and EU enlargement to the East. It is argued in this study that the liminality or the transitional stage can become an important tool in the hands of the small states to guide themselves in the contemporary international system. The theoretical framework proposed for the study of the discursive identity construction processes in Georgia during 1991-2016 draws on diverse and interdisciplinary sources. This research tries to combine liminality, which is borrowed from cultural-anthropology and the concepts of self-colonization from the post-colonial scholarship. As the specificity of the topic requires, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has been selected as the main methodological tool.