Soviet Legacies, New Public Management and Bureaucratic Entrepreneurship in the Georgian Protection Police. Agencifying the Police?

Abstract

The article studies agencification and commercialisation within the Georgian police, specifically the Protection Police Department as the successor organisation of the old extra-departmental guards. Despite ostensibly having been scheduled for privatisation from 2004, this unit was instead expanded and strengthened. Given the centrality of police reform in establishing the Saakashvili government's reformist credentials, this represents a critical case testing the limits of top-down neoliberal reform within the very institution that was seen as its centrepiece. It also shows how neo-managerialist forms of organisation—in particular the public law agency—are used to camouflage what remains, essentially, Soviet-style organisation.

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