Course Co-Directors: Nino Gozalishvili (The University of Georgia, Tbilisi / The George Washington University, Washington) and Rusudan Margiani (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest)
Georgia and Ukraine, both positioned on the edges of Europe while at the same time neighboring Russia, have long shared a paradoxical geopolitical fate—aspiring toward Europe, yet remaining haunted by the imperial ambitions and periodic invasions of Russia. Both nations serve as laboratories of identity-making, memory politics, and symbolic geopolitics, where religion, culture, and ideology intersect with geopolitical struggles. The course invites students to study Georgia and Ukraine as microcosms of post-imperial transformation, analyzing their history and present within a broader theoretical framework and regional context that includes the Caucasus and the Black Sea region. Students will explore how religion, civilizational discourse, and legacies of imperial rule shape modern statehood, social mobilization, and cultural self-understanding. Georgia’s contested nationalism, its European aspirations, and its painful yet ambivalent relationship with Russia will be analyzed alongside Ukrainian struggles with decolonization and pluralism. Using this comparative lens, the course examines how identity is negotiated through geopolitics; not only in military or strategic terms, but also through symbols, myths, rituals, and cultural narratives that define what it means to be “European,” “sovereign,” or “traditional” in the 21st century.