Disrupted Livelihoods, Debt, and Border Crossings: The Role of State(s) in Georgian Women’s Migration and Its Implications

My presentation focuses on the role of state(s) in the economic, social, and political oppression of Georgian Migrant Domestic Workers (MDWs). For several decades, the Georgian state has encouraged women to migrate to wealthier states in order to maintain its financial viability, while receiving countries have exploited and controlled Georgian MDWs to fill the social reproductive void in their own nation states. I first trace the multiple dispossessions that Georgian families experienced during the country’s transition to a neoliberal capitalist political economy following its independence from the USSR, and the subsequent civil war and Russian invasion. I then follow Georgian MDWs who, forced by the state to sustain their families by borrowing loans and by migrating, navigate border crossings. Migrant women who arrive in the receiving country experience extreme precariousness due to their position in the labour market and in relation to employer families based on their (non)migrant status. Migrant narratives convey feelings of hope shadowed by anxiety, sorrow, and ‘being in suspension’, in the face of possible (and sometimes real) danger of deportation, as well as in relation to their individual and family well-being. Drawing from my fieldwork with Georgian MDWs who work in Turkey, and through a feminist political economy perspective, I outline how state(s), in conjunction with intermediaries such as official and unofficial lenders and migrant smugglers, discipline migrant women by instituting neoliberal social reproductive relations, visa regulations, and debt repayment schemes. In the process, a neoliberal subjectivity is being instilled into post-Soviet Georgian citizens and emigrants.