Over the past several months, with the support of Women’s Fund Armenia, I spoke with Georgian feminist activists navigating one of the most difficult periods in their movement’s history.
As I listened to their stories, one thing became clear: the resilience that keeps a movement alive is built long before a crisis reaches its peak.
I expected conversations about restrictive laws, shrinking civic space and political repression. Those stories were there. But what stayed with me were the quieter realities, the ones that rarely make headlines.
The activists spoke about colleagues leaving not only because they feared for their safety, but because they were exhausted. They described organisations that still exist on paper but have lost the people who once gave them life.
They talked about preparing for arrest, moving conversations to encrypted apps, taking second jobs to survive and wondering whether the communities they had spent years building could ever be rebuilt.
Listening to them, I realised these were not simply Georgian stories. They are lessons for feminist movements across the South Caucasus.
Not because our countries are the same (they are not), but because the challenges confronting feminist organisations increasingly echo across borders. Too often, we only begin learning once a crisis has already arrived.
Movements don’t disappear overnight
One of the strongest messages from these conversations was that movements rarely collapse in a single dramatic moment. They are slowly hollowed out.
Funding disappears, offices close, experienced organisers leave, and volunteers burn out. Institutional memory quietly walks out the door with people who simply can no longer afford to stay.
One activist told me that even if political conditions changed tomorrow, “we will never go back to where we were before.”
The greatest loss is not only organisations. It is trust, relationships and years of collective learning and these cannot simply be restored with a new grant or a change in government.
Care is infrastructure
The interviews also reminded me that feminist movements do far more than campaign.
Across Georgia, feminist organisations have stepped in where the state has failed, providing legal assistance, psychological support and safe spaces for people with nowhere else to turn. As civil society itself comes under pressure, these services become harder to sustain precisely when they are needed most.
But care also has to extend inward.
The activists spoke openly about burnout, anxiety and the physical toll of living under constant uncertainty. They described relying on humour, friendship and informal networks to keep going when professional support became harder to access.
Care is not separate from activism. It is what makes activism possible.
Preparing is not pessimism
One activist told me she already has a plan for who will feed her cats, manage her finances and contact her landlord if she is arrested. “It’s just something I had to do,” she said.
Another described removing sensitive documents from home, installing security cameras and moving almost every conversation onto encrypted platforms.
None of this was presented dramatically. It had simply become part of everyday life.
Preparation, they explained, is not about giving in to fear. It is about refusing to let fear dictate every decision.
Movements survive through people
Several activists now work second jobs in hospitality, teaching or other sectors because civil society funding has disappeared. Many continue their activism entirely on a voluntary basis.
Yet when I asked what keeps them going, they rarely mentioned organisations or projects.
As one activist put it, “I’d rather have five people I trust than one hundred who are just standing next to me.”
It was a reminder that while grants, offices and programmes matter enormously, movements ultimately survive because people continue choosing one another.
Learning before the storm
The South Caucasus is often discussed through the language of conflict and geopolitics. Far less attention is paid to how feminist movements exchange ideas, support one another and learn across borders.
Perhaps we should do more of that. Not because Georgia’s path will become Armenia’s, or because every country follows the same trajectory, but because crises rarely leave enough time to invent responses from scratch.
The activists I interviewed were generous in sharing not only their struggles, but also the lessons they wished they had known earlier. That may be one of the most valuable forms of solidarity we can build across our region: turning lived experience into shared knowledge.
Learning from one another will not prevent every crisis. But it may help ensure that when difficult times arrive, our movements face them together, a little more prepared than before.
The article has been written with the support of the New Democracy Fund
