by Ina Kaplanishvili
“My student has been arrested“- a sentence often repeated among Georgian lecturers today.
I first learned about Max Weber’s principle of neutrality, the necessity of demarcating “is“ from “ought“, science from politics, during my bachelor studies. At that early stage, I accepted that idea almost uncritically.
Later, I encountered Hannah Arendt’s work. I still remember a warning from my former lecturer: as researchers, we must remain attentive to the emergence of totalitarian regimes, driven by various political actors seeking power – often at unexpected times. Arendt (2017) reminds us that it’s often the “neutral“ masses – the so-called “silent majority“ who enable such regimes. So, while I continued to respect Max Weber’s principles of scientific ethos, the ongoing protest movement in Georgia, started in 2024, shook my remaining commitment to Weberian neutrality. The first wave of protests erupted after the “foreign agent law[1]” targeted NGOs and independent media. A second wave followed when the government delayed EU integration until 2028, a move seen as deepening ties with Russia, which occupies 20% of Georgian territory. Together, these sparked one of the largest protest movements in Georgia’s post-Soviet history. In this context, Arendt’s influence transformed neutrality from a respectable idea into something deeply problematic. Political attentiveness has since become part of my moral compass as a future researcher. This led me to ask whether it’s ethical, or even possible, to keep science and politics strictly separate today.
More importantly, I argue that it’s no longer just a personal choice for scientists to remain neutral. While science and politics have always been interwoven, in Georgia, this entanglement has become particularly visible, as politics -by the same old means- has directly entered academic spaces. At dawn on November 19, 2024, during a student protest at Tbilisi State University (TSU), the government deployed police forces onto campus to suppress the demonstrations. This was not metaphorical but physical invasion. When police walk into university lecture halls, academia enters what Kastenhofer (2024) calls a “survival mode” in which scientists become visibly activists and citizens and public intellectuals work not only to produce new knowledge, but to preserve the very space where knowledge can be made.
In Georgia, this is not only triggered by physical force but deepened by censorship and new legal restrictions that reshape what can be taught, discussed or funded in academia. In such moments, speaking out is not radical, it is vital. As Thierry et al. (2023) warned, there is “no research on a dead planet.” But what about a silenced university? A banned curriculum? A generation of students told not to ask certain questions? In my context, the warning is clear: without space for critical and independent inquiry, the kind of research necessary to challenge power and prevent authoritarianism becomes muted.
In response to police at university and ongoing protest suppression, many lecturers, professors at TSU’s Faculty of Social and Political Sciences issued a strong public statement, condemning the “brutal suppression of peaceful civil protests by law enforcement agencies” during which numerous journalists, ordinary citizens, students “injured through the use of disproportionate, and deliberate, force.”
Moreover, there was an institutional form of political interference. On September 17, 2024, the Georgian Parliament passed the Law on Family Values and the Protection of Minors. The government claims it protects “traditional” family structures, but in practice, it restricts the rights and visibility of sexual minorities. Its effects include educational institutions. Under the new law, not only schools but also universities are banned from “promoting“ or even discussing content that includes gender identities differing from biological sex or same-sex relationships.
In this case, politics did not arrive with batons, but with curriculum guidelines. Gender studies, queer theory and discussions of identity are now labeled as “propaganda.” As Teona Mataradze, a prominent sociologist and gender studies scholar, put it in an interview with Media Platform 64, “The MA program in Gender Studies at TSU, the first in the South Caucasus, loses its meaning under this law.”
So, instead of asking whether Georgian lecturers, most of whom are also active researchers, have the luxury of Weberian neutrality, we should ask what “neutrality” even means and does under these circumstances. Does “neutrality” mean to stay silent when policy dictates what we can teach and research? When funding is revoked for certain “banned” topics? As STS scholars have long argued, boundaries between academic inquiry and state power are often illusions; science and society are always entangled. In Georgia, these limits haven’t just blurred; they’ve been openly violated, pushing scholars into survival mode.
As Kastenhofer (2024) argues, we are now witnessing the rise of a “survival science”- a science that acknowledges the collapse of old rules due to societal changes and crises – climate emergency, threats to liberal democracies, growing inequality – that fundamentally change academic expectations, self-understanding and ethos, and force us to ask the question: “What are, and what should be, our new norms for science in society?” (p. 344). This includes, as Kastenhofer notes, “radical interventions“ like “scientists going on strike and taking to the streets” (p. 347).
That’s why, when Georgian researchers in the social and political sciences marched, spoke out and defended their students and academic values, I did not see these actions as unexpected or extreme – but as “radical interventions” that I understand not as political, but as academic acts carried out in survival mode, triggered by crises: threats to freedom of speech, the autonomy of academia and the presence of police forces at university. In Georgia too, academics have been forced to go further and ask a question that lies at the heart of survival science: what should science become when the basic conditions for doing science are under threat? I believe that in Georgia (as in the world), academics are in the process of creating the new moral and practical compass to guide them through survival – meaning a world full of uncertainty and societal crises. Seeing academics march and protest, lecturers speaking through microphones, and university classes held in the streets gives me the courage to say that this transformation – the creation of a new ethos – has already begun in Georgia.
And lastly, though this essay focuses on Georgia, the issue is borderless. In both non-democratic and democratic countries- even in the USA- academic freedom is increasingly at risk.
Ina Kaplanishvili is a Georgian master’s student in Science and Technology Studies at the University of Vienna, with a background in sociology from the Georgian Institute of Public Affairs (GIPA). Her current research interests include digital practices and technologies as actors in civic and protest engagement.
Bibliography
Arendt, H. (2017). The origins of totalitarianism. Penguin Classics.
Kastenhofer, K. (2024). From a normal and a post-normal science ethos towards a survival science ethos? GAIA – Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society, 33(4), 344-350. https://doi.org/10.14512/gaia.33.4.4
Thierry, A., Horn, L., von Hellermann, P., & Gardner, C. J. (2023). “No research on a dead planet”: Preserving the socio-ecological conditions for academia. Frontiers in Education, 8, Article 1237076. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2023.1237076
[1] The document of „Law of Georgia on transparency of foreign influence“ (In English)