We are not enemies, we just disagree...?

Abstract: Since independence, Georgia’s political trajectory of democratic development has become all the more aimed towards integration with the EU and further disassociation from the Soviet past and Russia. By the engagements facilitated through the EU’s Eastern Partnership and the Association Agreement, the narrative of Georgian national identity as fundamentally European is seen as an all-encompassing consensus that lies as a ground for the envisaging of the process of democratic development. Such an establishment and commitment to a consensus does according to the agonistic approach to democracy inhibit an inclusive process with open possibilities for contestation. Through semi-structured interviews with actors from the political realm and the civil society, the role of contestation in the process of democratic development in Georgia was explored in a narrative analysis informed by the agonistic approach to democracy. This study concludes that despite that there is no legal hindrances for contestation in the Georgian political environment, the normative approach towards anti-Western sentiments and the view of politics as an antagonistic zero-sum game stifles the possibilities for agonistic contestation. All the while, the civil society is utilized instrumentally to display a political setting where contestation plays a role in informing the process of democratic development.