The “Global War Party” populist conspiracy in Georgia: origins and framework

Conspiracy theories have become a persistent feature of contemporary politics. In the wake of the 2022 Russia – Ukraine war, the ruling Georgian Dream party advanced what it calls the “Global War Party” While the conspiracy theory draws on familiar anti-Western narratives, it also introduces distinctive features by portraying hidden elites as simultaneously prolonging the conflict abroad and undermining Georgia’s sovereignty at home. This article proposes an analytical framework for studying the internal structure of such conspiracies, focusing on three elements: the actors involved, the objectives attributed to them, and the strategies through which they are said to operate. Drawing on a dataset of political quotations reported in leading Georgian media between 2022 and 2024, the analysis shows how the Global War Party discourse fuses global and domestic dimensions in ways that reinforce the government’s populist positioning. The findings underline the hybrid character of the Global War Party conspiracy – derivative yet unique – and demonstrate the value of the proposed framework for advancing comparative research on conspiratorial populism.