Protests and counter protests as a clash of subcultures in Georgia

Contemporary social protests may have a wide range of consequences, among which the most puzzling are counterprotesting. The latter represents the opposite subculture. Its emergence is a factual demonstration of a clash of opposing meaning systems existing in the same social context. Although there is a scholarship on countermovements, there is little known on interaction between protests and counterprotests as one cultural event. To understand why some demonstrations lead to counterdemonstrations and how the same shared cultural symbols are used in opposing repertoires, the paper examines social protests in Georgia since its independence. The research has covered the quantitative and qualitative analyses of the reasons and causes of all the demonstrations from 1995 to date. The results demonstrated that counterprotesting in Georgian reality is a relatively new phenomenon and is related to mostly the same social concerns over years, it usually has radical forms and it provides alternative perspectives on the common cultural symbols. The findings suggest a new conceptualization of counterprotesting of past and current social concerns of opposing subcultures in one cultural context.