Building Societal Support for the Rule of Law in Georgia

• NCJ Number: 208128
• Author(s): Roy Godson; Dennis Jay Kenney; Margaret Litvin; Gigi Tevzadze
• Date Published: October 2003
• Length: 120 pages
• Grant Number(s): 2001-IJ-CX-K016
• Agencies: NIJ-Sponsored
• Publication Type: Program/Project Description

Annotation

This report offers a summary and a final report of a strategy designed to build public support for the rule of law in Georgia.

Abstract

The State of Georgia has suffered corruption problems in its government that serve as a major obstacle to economic development. As such, with funding from the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), the National Strategy Information Center designed a Project Report to address lawfulness at the cultural level in Georgia. The plan involves training and educating a core group of Georgian leaders on anticorruption and pro-lawfulness techniques. The leaders will be pulled from three main sectors of society based on their ability to reach massive numbers of Georgian citizens: public education, “centers of moral authority” (such as religious leaders and civil society leaders), and the mass media. Once these leaders have been trained, they have the ability to teach massive numbers of Georgians to support the rule of law, thus creating a pro-lawfulness culture in Georgia. This report includes both a summary of the Project Report, as well as the Project Report itself. Following the introduction in section 1, section 2 describes the corruption problem in Georgia’s government. Section 3 reviews the anticorruption efforts undertaken in Georgia, which mainly center on increased enforcement activities and regulatory reform. Section 4 outlines the cultural approach to fostering a pro-lawfulness culture, while section 5 provides examples from other communities of the cultural approach and provides evidence for its effectiveness. Section 6 argues that the main opportunities for cultural change occur through the training of leaders in the three key sectors. Section 7 reviews the projects that Georgian leaders, in cooperation with NSIC investigators, determined would be the most feasible to undertake in their community. The conclusion in section 8 states that following 3 to 5 years of intense training, Georgia’s culture should show signs of shifting to a culture that supports the rule of law. Endnotes, references, appendixes