Scientific article
Published:
Proxy Games and Freezing Conflict: Trilateral Identifications, Fear, and Agency in Russia-Georgia Relations Post-Crimea
Written by
Julie Wilhelmsen
Research Professor, Head of the Research group for Eastern Europe and Asia
Salome Minesashvili
Ed.
Summary:
This article argues that conflicts can be frozen through engagement in mutual trilateral identification games that marginalize lower-level political entities while elevating their danger through identification with threatening third-party Others. Drawing on and broadening the literature on national identity discourse, securitization, and foreign policy, the article theorizes and investigates trilateral identifications and combines two sets of such Self/Other/Other representations as they emerge in official language between two political entities over time. It analyzes relations between Russia and Georgia in the period following the onset of the conflict in Ukraine in 2014, after which Moscow intensified its activities in the post-Soviet space with reference to Western encroachment in its so-called “near abroad.” While Russia re-emphasized Georgia as a Proxy of the threatening “West,” Georgia reduced the breakaway republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia to Proxies of Putin’s “expansionist Russia.” These evolving mutual identifications of Self and Other(s) not only rendered policy practices of diplomacy and negotiation less reasonable, but they also contributed to freezing conflict by removing the agency to act and compromise at the imagined negotiating table from the Proxy to the alleged “real” third-party Other.
- Published year: 2025
- Full version: Read here
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DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1525/cpcs.2025.2688940
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Language: English
- Journal: Communist and Post-Communist Studies
Written by
Julie Wilhelmsen
Research Professor, Head of the Research group for Eastern Europe and Asia
Salome Minesashvili