Digital Resilience in a Hybrid Security Culture: Georgia between Institutional Continuity and Political Realignment

This study challenges the conventional understanding of resilience to hybrid threats that frames it primarily as a matter of institutional capacity-building. Drawing on policy documents, statements of high-level officials, and semi-structured interviews with experts and civil society organizations, it traces Georgia’s security culture from the aftermath of the Russo-Georgian war in 2008. Through intertextual discourse analysis, the article cross-examines the institutional architecture of digital resilience encompassing cybersecurity (systemic), media regulation (protective) and media literacy (empowerment) measures with the government’s rhetoric (2023–2025), while interview data provides contextual insights. The analysis reveals a hybrid security culture manifested in a fragmented governance and discursive struggle over resilience. Although formal policy frameworks normatively align with the West and consistently identify Russia as the principal security threat, political rhetoric increasingly portrays same Western actors as sources of foreign interference and prioritises political autonomy over cooperation while still invoking commitments to constitutionally enshrined Euro-Atlantic trajectory. This divergence between institutional design and political discourse weakens coherence in resilience-building efforts. It suggests that in hybrid regimes formal resilience frameworks may function symbolically to signal external alignment, whereas practice follows short-term political calculus and discretionary authority, leaving state institutions and society vulnerable to evolving forms of foreign interference.