Course Co-Directors: Giga Zedania (Ilia State University) and Ghia Nodia (Ilia State University)
The course examines how political order is produced not only through laws, bureaucracies and official organizations, but also through personal ties, unwritten rules, tacit knowledge and informal networks. Such arrangements can compensate for ineffective institutions, facilitate cooperation and provide access to resources. They can also distribute privileges, enforce loyalty, conceal responsibility and concentrate power. Informality is therefore neither inherently beneficial nor inherently destructive: its effects depend on the relationships it organizes and the formal institutions with which it interacts.
The expression “Informal Leviathan” describes the capacity of networks and practices to generate durable forms of coordination and control. The course asks how trust, friendship, patronage, corruption and coercion become organizing principles of political life. It also considers the other side of informal association: its ability to sustain solidarity, civic mobilization and resistance outside officially supervised channels. Literature and cinema are examined as fields in which informal authority can be made visible, criticized or legitimized.
The course moves from general theories of institutions and informality to the Soviet and post-Soviet experience, with particular attention to Georgia. It considers the transformation of personal networks after the Soviet collapse, trust and distrust, civil and uncivil society, corruption, criminal authority, institutional reform, and the persistence of informal power within formally modern institutions. The final session brings these perspectives together by examining the changing configuration of informality across Georgia’s post-independence regimes.