“I came, but I am so frustrated . . . I can’t sense the charge (mukhti) in people. Nothing is happening.” Mari tells Nutsa as they bump into each other on one of the anti-government protests in November 2019. Nutsa agreed with Mari. Nothing was happening. But what was supposed to be happening? What did she mean by the absence of charge? Everything seemed to be in place at a glance: thousands had gathered. It was noisy and packed. All the choreography was right, but the charge was nevertheless missing. Standing there seemed to have no point for Mari. 

Mukhti, literally charge, cannot be objectively identified as anything tangible. It is an immaterial density that can only be sensed. The word itself signals a vague sensation of energy and electrifying intensity in the crowd. In fact, mukhti is a measure of affect dispersed among the crowd, the force of intent. How ready people are to have something irreversibly altered—that is what mukhti channels. In fact, mukhti radiates pervasive, yet inarticulate collective anxiety: an anticipatory state that teeters between contradictory possibilities of dangers and triumphs. This anxiety is beyond atmospheric turbulence signaling destruction, not just an “ugly feeling,” nor an irrational “objectless fear” but an embodied intensity shaped by the collectively remembered scripts of what happens during protests (see Batiashvili et al. 2025 for the paradigm linking memory and anxiety).  In such anxiousness, an array of contradictory emotions coexist: anger, pride, joy, rage, fear, effervescence, trepidation, excitement, alertness and more ; all experienced as a single affective state, registered in the restless charge of those who protest.

The absence of this charge is often attributed to nihilism, exhaustion (see Aydemir, this collection), or a lack of anger in public. At other times, the leaders are blamed for the absence of charge. Ironically, Georgian leaders wait for people to show up with mukhti in order to make something happen. 

During another set of protests following the 2020 rigged parliamentary elections, Nutsa asked an opposition leader, standing among the crowd: “What is your plan?” “It depends on the people’s charge,” he responded. It was not the first time that khalkhis (people’s) mukhti was invoked as a defining political force. It irked people that politicians had no concrete plans to translate protests into tangible results. How could things hinge on people’s charge? “These demonstrations won’t lead anywhere on their own,” Nutsa insisted. “It’s the cumulative effect,” he said, “if protests continue for months, it’s going to accumulate in the end, wouldn’t it?” Wasn’t it striking that a politician who participated in Soviet-era liberation movements and in the 2003 Rose Revolution deferred to the popular charge? The fantasy about khalkhis mukhti presumed some sort of mythic causation—a deus ex machina effect—animating the plotline of protests.  

Emerging in the protest vocabulary of the 1980s, mukhti has since become a key term for describing moments of mass mobilization and the crowd’s transformative power. Yet it is saturated with memories often absent from public discourse, haunted by the ghosts of trauma. This dual etymology is rooted in the memory of April 9, 1989—commemorated as the foundational triumph of Georgia’s liberation movement, yet inseparable from the traumatic memory of the Soviet raid that left twenty-one people dead. Many who witnessed the 1989 tragedy recall a strange density settling in the silent crowd as they heard the hum of the approaching Soviet tanks. Witnesses later described these minutes as charged, electrifying, or thick with atmospheric intensity. 

Today, references to these events are usually absent in the descriptions of mukhti, but the anticipatory anxiety radiating from the intensity of “charge” prevails. As the latest wave of protests defending Georgia’s pro-European choice evolved, Nino kept inquiring about the people’s sense of mukhti during marches and demonstrations of 2024–2026. Her interlocutors would sometimes ascribe mukhti to the size of a crowd, described as the intensity that promises hope, solidarity, and endurance, at times linked to soundscapes and movement.  

“You feel [mukhti] . . . when marching, the girl’s chants . . . and goosebumps take you over, you start believing that we are going to get to the end [. . .] the sense of mukhti . . . motivates you to come back the next day” (Nino, age 47). 

Others have reflected on the sense of energy, hinting that something is about to happen or felt as the collective intent, but not necessarily as a preamble to change: 

“Mukhti is some sort of energy . . . when people unite around the same idea . . . You feel the engulfing energy and being connected” (Elene, age 32).    

Unlike Durkheimian effervescence, mukhti is about more than just excitement and communal intimacy. There is an unacknowledged darkness in mukhti, the unuttered readiness not only for the aspired ending, but for what comes before it—the sacrifice. Few people have explicitly captured this tension between fear and excitement embodied in mukhti. Tamar, in her forties, for instance, only alluded to how mukhti works to soothe the fear of violence: 

It’s a sense of security, if a raid suddenly begins, I feel like I won’t be run over and . . .  I have been alone and didn’t sense that much mukhti, more fear. . . . without safety, there’s no mukhti for me . . . when you feel safe, you seemingly have more energy, and that is mukhti, the energy.

Her words suggest that mukhti emerges not in the absence of threatening anticipation, but when this anticipation is eased by the crowd’s presence. 

Indeed, the fear of raid, violence, or casualties is inevitably included in the anticipatory repertoire of Georgia’s protests. Since the early 1990s, protests have been brutally crushed roughly 101 times, 26 of those occurring in 2024 only. The 1990s protests culminated in the civil war, in 2003, they were driven to the edge of civil confrontation, but ended in peaceful revolution, in 2007, the protests involved street violence and resulted in snap elections. Since 2024, violence has operated through a recognizable repertoire. Apart from being raided, people anticipate arrests, fines, individual attacks, and aggression from the police forces. 

Despite the disproportional ratio of fruitful vs futile protests, mukhti works to engender irrevocable faith in a breakthrough. It hovers over the protests as an atmospheric intensity alerted to the scripts of violence while latching onto the promised victory. It registers a particular state of anxiousness which can emerge and is sought after only during protests. Yet, mukhti is an embodied and spatially situated register of a much broader and persistent collective anxiety in Georgia that teeters between distinct future scenarios and distinct notions of peoplehood.