When the old guard returns: crisis-driven comebacks of former political leaders in Georgia and Azerbaijan

Why do former political leaders return to the highest offices of state during crises in transitional political orders? This study theorizes the crisis-context comeback: a pathway through which former leaders are recruited, or position themselves, to lead collapsing successor governments. It operates along a continuum from invited restoration, where crisis generates demand for experienced leadership, to crisis-capture, where crisis converts latent positioning into an actionable return. Process-tracing Shevardnadze in Georgia (1992) and Aliyev in Azerbaijan (1993), with Armenia as a shadow case, identifies two necessary conditions and two conditioning factors: state crisis (necessary condition); prior-regime governing capital (a compound of administrative competence, patronage networks, coercive-institutional knowledge), international standing, and ideological flexibility (necessary supply-side resource); speed of predecessor failure (scope condition); and external facilitation (permissive condition). The study makes three contributions: it extends the comeback literature beyond its electoral focus by specifying two non-electoral pathways and how the same structural factors configure differently across them; it inverts the prevailing causal arrow by treating comeback as outcome rather than cause; and it introduces prior-regime governing capital as a five-dimensional compound resource applicable to crisis-driven leadership transitions beyond the post-Soviet context.