When “it's time” to say “enough!”: youth activism before and during the Rose and Orange Revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine

Abstract

This thesis focuses on the emergence and development of two youth opposition campaigns, Kmara in Georgia and Pora in Ukraine, campaigns which were part of the “coloured revolutions” which took place in Eastern Europe in 2003 and 2004. The thesis identifies, analyzes and compares the influence and the role of youth activism in post-communist countries, and attributes a new role to the Kmara and Pora campaigns as vanguards of oppositional protest and transmitters of public grievances in the under-researched context of semi-authoritarian regimes. Two sets of questions are answered in this study, which relate to how and why youth opposition campaigns occurred and developed in Georgia and Ukraine. These questions are addressed through a comparative analysis of the political and social contexts in which narratives on Kmara and Pora are placed. Based on the combination of four main approaches to the study of social movements – viz. political opportunities, resource mobilization, framing processes, and diffusion – the analysis enabled deep insight into various aspects of the emergence and development of Kmara and Pora's campaigns and exposed commonalities and differences between them. The study confirms that the fixed and volatile features that decided on the nature of Georgian and Ukrainian regime provide a key tool for understanding the outburst of youth political activism in a hybrid form of a political system.