In 1122, King David IV. reconquered Tbilisi from the Muslims. In those times, a bloodbath among the former oppressors would have been the logical consequence of such a victory. Leaders of the High Middle Ages took merciless revenge against their enemies once they had defeated them. Yet David did not! To the contrary, he did not only let the former rulers live, but David was even anxious that the Muslim population might leave Tbilisi after the fall of the city. In order to send a strong signal of appreciation and friendship to the Muslim population...

Many of the influential critics of capitalism shared a sentiment that life under competitive pressure is not good for human beings. Marx felt deep uneasiness about the fact that workers have to “sell” their workforce -- he feared that this would contribute to “alienation” between the worker and their work. One of the main objectives of the Socialist society was therefore to create a new kind of human, a human who would not compete with others in the market arenas and who would not be driven by selfish motives. Rather, the human grown in Socialism would c...

During the last three months, the Agricultural Policy Research Center (APRC) of ISET-PI was working on a study about family farming in Georgia. Within this project, we conducted interviews with farmers and owners of agribusinesses. These interviews elicited many intriguing facets of Georgian agriculture, but one aspect I found particularly interesting was that Georgian farmers apparently have a rather negative view on agricultural jobs. In Samtskhe-Javakheti we were told the story of a middle-age unemployed man who was offered a job as a shepherd by anot...

In October 2007, responding to the problem of very low birthrates in the country, Ilia II. of Georgia, the Catholicos-Patriarch of All Georgia, announced that he would personally baptize any third and subsequent child born to Orthodox families from that time onwards. This promise seems to have had a considerable impact on the reproduction behavior of Georgians. According to the National Statistics Office of Georgia (NSOG), the number of births increased from about 49,000 in 2007 to about 57,000 in 2008 and 63,000 in 2009. This is a remarkable 28% increas...

Nodar Dumbadze has a reputation for bringing tears and laughs out of his readers. Yet, when watching his “Hellados” performed in the tiny municipal “Culture House” in Terjola, we were laughing and crying not only in appreciation of Dumbadze's rare ability to weave tragedy and comedy into a single narrative. We were certainly moved by Dumbadze’s story of teenagers growing up in the tough multiethnic environment of Sukhumi, the love-hate relationship between the Georgian Jemal and the Greek Ianguli, and their ultimate love for their homeland. But, perhaps ...

Some weeks ago, I was invited by a development bank to the Hotel Eden in Kvareli, Kakheti, where we discussed Georgia’s possibilities to develop economically. When we talked about the potential of the manufacturing sector, one of the attending bank employees said: “The problem is that Georgia does not have Rudolf Diesel and Nikolaus Otto.” I think that there is some truth in this sentence, which one might alter so that it fits better to modern times: “The problem is that Georgia does not have a Mark Zuckerberg/Steve Jobs/Bill Gates/Larry Page” or, to rem...