Responding to autocratization : CSO strategic responses and legitimation under autocratization pressures in Georgia

Sammanfattning

This thesis investigates how civil society organizations (CSOs) respond to institutional and discursive pressures in contexts of rapid autocratization in the case of Georgia. The study analyses the material through a framework derived from Christine Oliver’s typology of strategic responses to institutional pressure with Theo van Leeuwen’s categories of legitimation. The framework is applied to material collected from 13 semi-structured interviews with representatives of Georgian CSOs and is complemented by CSO responses to letters from the Anti-Corruption Bureau. The findings demonstrate that Georgian CSOs employ a variety of strategic responses including limited instances of acquiescence as well as compromise, avoidance, defiance, and, to a lesser extent, manipulation. Responses are discursively legitimized by CSOs through different legitimizing discourses. Examples of legitimation include authorization through appeals to authority such as the law, the use of moral claims echoing moral evaluation, emphasizing organizational aims and abilities through rationalization, and mythopoesis by embedding their struggle within broader historical narratives, particularly concerning the role of Russia. By systematically integrating behavioural and discursive dimensions of CSO agency the thesis contributes both theoretically as well as empirically through a combined approach for analysing response and legitimation and by providing temporally relevant insights into civil society adaptation under ongoing autocratization in Georgia respectively.