Suchergebnisse

Following the collapse of Communist regimes across Eurasia, ecuritization became a pressing problem for newly emerging democracies as ruling elites in many post-Soviet states used securitization as a shield for retaining power. This study is based on case study analyses and has two objectives: to highlight the dynamics of Georgia's securitization process, and to show how this process corresponds to existing theoretical and empirical experience. It is evident that the formulation of threat perceptions and the decision making process in Georgia have been constructed and dominated by the elite of the United National Movement(UNM). Georgia's move under Saakashvili's regime on securitization has been fairly controversial – it has been responsible for both the rise and then the fall of his regime. During the last decade, Georgia under Saakashvili's rule has represented a bright illustration of the beginning of a successful and then failed securitization process. Research shows thatsecuritization can be successful in the short run and is particularly likely to succeed in post-communist and Eurocentric countries, ruled by authoritarian or "competitive authoritarian regimes". However, in the long run, securitization leads to the curbing of basic freedoms and the introduction of far-reaching extraordinary measures in the name of security cannot sustain itself and inevitably fails.

This paper aims to further investigate hybrid regimes, which are becoming a more and more analysed topic in political studies. After the pathbreaking article by Thomas Carothers (Carothers, 2002) where he claims that many of the regimes that were considered usually in "transition" were actually proved highly durable and did not move neither toward autocracy nor democracy, other scholars started to be interested in this particular phenomenon as such. In this paper I stem from the definition of Hybrid regimes provided by Leonardo Morlino: "A hybrid regime is always a set of ambiguous institutions […] lacking as it does one or more essential characteristics of that regimebut also failing to acquire other characteristics that would make it fully democratic or authoritarian" (Morlino, 2008:7), in order to investigate how incumbents hold and strengthen power in this peculiar political and institutional environment, without forcefully becoming neither fully authoritarian or fully democratic.