Unbuilding, as the editors of this lexicon note, indicates forms of purposeful world-making, emerging from the ruins of previous systems. From the streets of Tbilisi unbuilding appears to entail different kinds of movement: people marching, ideas circulating but also the movement enforced upon people by the lack of opportunities at home, and that of the unruly materials that relate to previous modes of building. These mobile parts of the country’s present, variegated as they are, have been arranged together into new geometries by protesters who took over the country's streets in the aftermath of the recent parliamentary elections. In this piece I explore what comes into view if we see unbuilding as manifested through movement.

On November 24, 2024, hundreds of women marched across the Georgian capital of Tbilisi carrying empty suitcases. When they arrived at the house of Bidzina Ivanishvili, leader of the ruling party, Georgian Dream, they threw their suitcases at his doorstep, chanting: “You leave! We are staying!” For the past five years, there has been a dramatic rise in emigration from Georgia. Tens of thousands of people, the majority of whom are women, have left the country in search for work in Europe. This march is one of the many that have taken place since the ruling party’s controversial re-election in October 2024. For months on end, people poured into Tbilisi’s roads and squares: blocking crossroads, creating makeshifts encampments, marching. The crowds on the streets were heterogenous and their demands are sometimes contrasting, but underwriting the incessant tide of these ongoing protests is an observation that that chimes with social movements thousands of miles away: when economic development is equated with the flourishing of wealth, it constitutes “an attack on life” (Aroshvili 2023).

In the Republic of Georgia, development has been synonymous with infrastructure. Since its independence from the Soviet Union, the country has sought to harness its geographical position at the edge of formerly competing geopolitical blocs to become an indispensable corridor for flows of goods and energy. This developmental horizon rests on a belief in the inherent good of different forms of building. Consecutive governments have worked to open Georgia up to projects of different kinds: from pipelines, to railways, to highways, to dams and ports.  However, today failed infrastructure projects dot the country whilst ones that are still being built already show signs of failures to come: unsound building practices, missing environmental assessments and disregard for the needs of local population. In villages like Anaklia and Shuakhevi, where ports and dams were once promised, the material components of these failed infrastructural projects are disintegrating and moving into the ground and the air (Gambino 2024). This makes living in proximity to these sites now dangerous and unbearable. Across Georgia, matter moves as evidence of development’s unbuilding. For those who live and work amidst the material legacies of these cycles of speculation and failure, securing decent livelihoods has become increasingly hard and many have been forced to respond themselves through movement, leave the country in search of a better future.

As infrastructural promises fall apart, and a migrant economy fills the gaps, we now find it is not mega projects but the movement of women that is sustaining Georgia’s economy. In the face of infrastructural failures, the country’s economy has become increasingly dependent on remittances sent from migrants to their families back in Georgia. Today remittances make up 14 percent of the national GDP, almost double the percentage of 1997 when Georgia was just exiting years of violent civil war. However, whilst this movement of people and money may be propping up a disintegrating infrastructure-based economy it is also unbuilding families and relationships. Spraypainted on the suitcases piled up outside Ivanishvili’s residence are sentences that make the challenges women have been forced to contend with painfully visible—“don’t force us to migrate,” “migration breaks families,” “mothers shouldn’t have to choose children or survival,” “support emigrating parents, not oligarchs.”

If movement as migration unbuilds social relations, movement in another sense is enabling a programmatic approach to unbuilding the present to make a better future. In the past five years dissident voices have grown louder, building a political movement that has claimed some important victories such as halting the construction of one of the largest dams in the country, known as Namakhvani. In challenging the construction of new infrastructures, the privatization of common land, the exploitation of labor and vital resources, the demand advanced by affected communities and their supporters is not just to stop building, but to start unbuilding the logic that made these projects seem necessary.

Days after the contested election, the newly reinstated Prime Minister announced his commitment to build the Namakhvani Dam. No longer sustainable as a promise, this is now experienced by protestors as an imposition. In response, the streets have become a site where, in the context of escalating and terrifying state repression, a movement towards a different kind of future has taken shape (Khalvashi and Nakhutsrishvili 2024). Public discussions are held every day outside the public broadcaster, tackling themes such as uneven development, the fractures between the capital city and the regions, infrastructural harm, and the need for fair, inclusive, and democratically accountable forms of development. These discussions have provided building blocks for the creation of the Movement for Social Democracy. Its founding statement highlights the necessity to counter the  “deliberate plunder of our people, nature, and Soviet infrastructure” that has marked Georgia’s recent past. This collective experiment centers unbuilding, revealing how movement(s) can start to shape an alternative where the flourishing of life is offered as a counter to the decades of harm that have been done in the name of development.