Anti-developmentalism and conflict : 'materialist' theory of ethnopolitical conflict : the case of Georgia

Abstract

This thesis seeks to provide a theoretical reasoning through which the political economic background of the post-Soviet transformation could be observed. The argument commences with a critique of the perspectives derived from modernization theory and draws on ideas educed from the approaches of historical sociology, which essentially stress the role of the state breakdown in social transformation. The crucial analytical bridge between the historically-oriented knowledge of state formation and break up and the empirical reality of the Soviet state is provided by the theoretical insights originating from the world-system analysis distinguishing a particular class of developmentalist states that attempted to overcome underdevelopment and catch up with the Western core while applying revolutionary and often totalitarian strategies. These strategies, responding to the large structural processes and apparently diverging from the prevailing systemic 'capitalist' ideas, brought about fundamental social changes that later contributed to the fall of the Soviet developmentalist regime. The empirical part of the thesis follows the trajectories of these social changes in Georgia and illustrates how these transformations, expressed in class perspective, accounted for the violent transition of the Caucasian country in the late 1980s and early 1990s.