Javakheti; Georgia; Armenians; informality; ethnic minority

The paper focuses on Javakheti, Georgia’s historical region which forms the eastern part of the Samtskhe-Javakheti province of Georgia. Javakheti itself is not an administrative unit, however, it more or less overlaps with the present-day districts of Akhalkalaki and Ninotsminda. In these two districts, bordering the Republic of Armenia, ethnic Armenians make up 95.1 per cent of the population. Uneasy relations between Javakheti Armenians and the central government in Tbilisi led to the formation of a complex set of informal political institutions, which enabled both ethnic Armenian elite and the central government in Tbilisi to find a kind of coexistence acceptable for both of them, and which contributed to the preservation of status quo in the Javakheti region. Using Gretchen Helmke and Steven Levitsky’s model of interaction between formal and informal political institutions, the proposed paper identifies and analyses the formation of individual informal political institutions which frame the Tbilisi-Javakheti relations (such as the virtual polity, semi-detached economy, or informal cultural autonomy) or which are present in Javakheti’s internal politics (such as local informal leaders or nationalist movements). The analysis has revealed general patterns of interactions between formal and informal political institutions in Javakheti. Whereas in the early 1990s the informal institutions in Javakheti substituted the ineffective formal institutions of the Georgian state, later on the informal institutions accommodated the undesired outcomes produced by the formal institutions. Finally, the central government, in exchange for their support, turned a blind eye to the clientelism and corruption practiced by Javakheti’s informal networks.