Ivanishvili is the linchpin in the current Georgian political system.  If we are to understand the nature of Georgia’s political system today, we need to examine Ivanishvili's personality and history more closely.  In Georgia, outsized personalities have always played a decisive role in politics and have consistently abused their power.  Ivanishvili is no different. But we argue that he has gone beyond his predecessors, Eduard Shevardnadze and Mikheil Saakashvili, to create an illiberal and anti-European system which leaves no political space for either party opponents or civil society activists. Currently, almost all of Georgia’s major opposition party leaders are in prison.  We call it a quasi-dictatorship. In 2025 Ivanishvili’s Georgia has moved closer to the model of Alexandr Lukashenko in Belarus than the illiberal model established in Hungary of Victor Orban.

The development of a spirit of regional cooperation has been the main political development in the Greater Central Asian region in recent years. This process is accelerating and taking place at different levels. Primary among the initiatives underway is the deepening of cooperation among the five states of Central Asia, where the consultative meetings of Heads of State are being insti- tutionalized and expanded into cooperation on the ministerial and parliamentary level, governed by strategies of cooperation adopted by regional leaders. Beyond this, more intensive structures of cooperation have been set up between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the leading states of the region. Furthermore, trilateral mechanisms have emerged, including one centered on the Fer- ghana Valley involving Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, as well as a Trans-Caspian tri- lateral involving Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan. Taken together, these mechanisms of cooperation at different levels and involving different partners suggest a rapdly evolving coop- erative spirit across the region, undergirded by an emerging common identity.