Geopolitics of care: rethinking through the contradictions of socialist social reproduction in Soviet Georgia

This article reconceptualises social reproduction in Soviet Georgia through the lens of the geopolitics of care, arguing that care functioned not only as a domain of welfare provision but as a key technology of imperial governance. Drawing on feminist geopolitics, a pluralised Social Reproduction Theory (SRT), and the coloniality of welfare regimes, it examines how the organisation of labour, welfare, and everyday life simultaneously structured gender relations and mediated Georgia’s position within the Soviet imperial order. It challenges mainstream SRT’s capitalist focus by relocating analysis to a non-capitalist setting where life-making was centrally organised by the state. The study adopts a historical-discursive and interpretive approach, critically engaging secondary sources on Soviet policies, welfare arrangements and history. It develops a scalar analysis across two interlinked relations: women–state and state–empire, showing how socialist care infrastructures expanded women’s participation in the labour market while reproducing gendered hierarchies, dependencies, and forms of state control. These contradictions are made visible through moments of resistance, approached as diagnostic sites where tensions between care and control become legible. It concludes by reflecting on how these historical formations continue to shape post-socialist imaginaries of care, dependency, and geopolitical belonging in Georgia today.