According to William Zartman “Borders run across land but through people. On maps they appear
as fine one-dimensional lines, whereas on the ground they have many dimensions. Borders are
boundaries in depth, space around a line, place where state meets society” (Zartman 2010:16). It is
impossible to understand borders, without peripheral relations between the states and societies they
contain. Itself borders are zones in which people create special relationship with other people.
In this thesis, I plan to write about the case of a small minority group located on the periphery in
Georgia in order to understand how minorities find a place in an ethnically diverse and rapidly
changing society. Their responses to changing central policies and border conditions provide an
ideal opportunity to see how elements of the population not only respond to, but also actively
constitute, the conditions of a border regime and sovereignty.
Georgia is a state with a highly diverse population, and boundary conditions are everywhere in the
society. In addition, the country has complex borders with neighboring countries such as Russia,
where population groups are distributed across boundaries and have a long history of coping with
border conditions. Borderlands are “zones of varying widths, in which people have recognizable
configurations of relationships to people inside the zone, on both sides of the borderline but within
the cultural landscape of the borderlands, and, as people of the border, special relationships with
other people and institutions in their respective nation and state?? (Donnan and Wilson 1994:8).
The post-independence period has been one of rapid change, which makes it possible to observe
the ways that sovereignty is formed in local contexts, and the role of elements of the population in
relations between the state and the population.
In case of the form of comparative analysis of the state border political changes, in this thesis I will
show socio-cultural and economic changes of ethnic minority in Georgia. I will show how borders
affect the groups living near them.