Abstract for "For the Motherland, God, and Purity: Religious Violence and the Politics of Memory in Georgia."

Since its independence, Georgia has struggled with religious violence. In 1999, sixty Jehovah’s Witnesses were attacked by a mob led by defrocked Orthodox priest Vasily Mkalavishvili, who later stated that he had acted “in defense of Georgia” by attacking those that he perceived as “traitors to the motherland” for their “abandonment” of the Georgian Orthodox Church. In 2021, Orthodox priests joined far-right counter-protestors in beating up demonstrators during Tbilisi Pride, which resulted in multiple injuries and the death of one journalist documenting the event. Beforehand, clergyman Spiridon Tskifurishvili addressed the far-right protestors, stating they were “…obliged to commit violence for the motherland, for God, [and] for purity.”  A high-ranking Georgian cleric, meanwhile, hastised Western representatives critical of the violence, stating that “[they] want to force [their] profligate, obscene, and depraved ideals on Georgia.” And in 2024, fighting broke out between local Orthodox Christians and Muslims in the village of Adigeni after a group of Orthodox Christians “aggressively interrupted” a prayer at a mosque. In all three cases, the police, the judiciary, the government, the Georgian Orthodox Church, and many ordinary Georgians turned a blind eye—or outright lent their support to the attackers. In this paper, I investigate the motivations for these—and other—attacks and set out to better understand the reactions of the state, major institutions, and the public to them, drawing on some of my previous work on religion, identity, conflict, and peace in Georgia to do so. 

This paper is available upon request.