What the South Caucasus can teach the West about self-reliance.
In the South Caucasus, people don’t wait for permission to solve problems. They build what they need with what they have, rarely expecting help from above.
In Georgia and Armenia, where trust in centralized institutions remains low, and bureaucracy is often a barrier rather than a source of support, people have developed something the West is quietly losing: a cultural instinct for self-reliance.
This instinct isn’t merely an ideal. It’s how you survive when the electricity cuts off, the health system is underfunded, or the local mayor is more interested in photo-ops than potholes. And in an era where the West is drowning in regulation, dependency, and top-down planning, there’s a quiet lesson to learn from this chaotic but functional region: you don’t need a perfect state to thrive. You need community, creativity, and the freedom to act. Take the US education system, for instance: bloated with bureaucracy and standardized testing, it often leaves teachers and students disempowered. Yet grassroots learning programs, homeschooling networks, and community-funded initiatives are filling the gap where the system fails. It’s not perfection, but it’s people making it work.
Resilience Over Reliance
Walk through a Georgian village, and you’ll see what happens when people are left to their own devices. Neighbors help each other harvest grapes for homemade wine (still sold informally across the country). Elderly women sell fresh herbs and churchkhela (a traditional candy) on sidewalks, free from the burdens of permit requirements and corporate oversight. Families run informal guesthouses in the mountains, marketing them through WhatsApp groups and word of mouth.
These aren’t just charming cultural quirks. They’re acts of economic resilience in the face of weak formal systems. In places like Tusheti or Samtskhe-Javakheti, basic infrastructure remains unreliable. So, people build their own roads, pool money for communal repairs, and even organize snow-clearing efforts when the state forgets about them.
In Armenia, following the 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh, the state was largely unprepared to provide shelter and support for thousands of displaced people. Amid a sluggish state response, civil society organizations, church networks, and even Telegram channels stepped in to organize food, housing, and trauma support. Volunteers mapped available apartments, delivered supplies, and coordinated transportation. There was no centralized strategy—just decentralized action. And it worked.
Informal Economies, Real Freedom
Western economists often call informal markets a liability. But in the Caucasus, they’re both a lifeline and a form of liberty.
Take the “Depo” markets in Tbilisi or the sprawling bazaar in Yerevan’s Malatia-Sebastia district. There, vendors pay in cash, negotiate prices freely, and adapt to demand with remarkable speed. One week, they sell knockoff sneakers; the next, handmade soaps or used car parts. There are no rigid licensing rules or city planning boards. Just the rhythm of supply and demand.
During COVID-19, when lockdowns and curfews shuttered much of Europe’s small business sector, informal workers in Georgia quickly adapted. Drivers became delivery services. Farmers used Facebook groups to sell produce directly to urban customers. An entire underground logistics system sprang up almost overnight. Not because the government coordinated it, but because people didn’t wait to be rescued.
Bureaucracy in the West
In the West, too many people have been taught that problems are solved by voting harder or lobbying louder. Need a home? Demand rent control. Can’t find a job? Blame capitalism. When crisis hits, the first instinct isn’t to organize with neighbors—it’s to wait for a government program.
But too often, public programs are misaligned with real-world problems. In France, getting a business license is a bureaucratic maze. In California, housing costs are blamed on market failure, when in reality, it’s zoning laws and environmental review processes that prevent anything from getting built. Who survives? The biggest developers. Everyone else gets locked out.
Meanwhile, the South Caucasus, with its ad hoc, unregulated approach, isn’t paralyzed. It adapts.
The Power of Localism
One of the most powerful examples of bottom-up resilience comes from the Rioni Valley in Western Georgia. When the government backed a foreign-owned hydropower project that threatened to flood villages and displace families, locals didn’t wait for elite NGOs or political parties. They camped out, organized rallies, built roadside information booths, and livestreamed their protests. With no central command, they created one of the country’s most impactful grassroots resistance movements in years and forced the project to a halt.
That’s the kind of decentralized organizing power that Western activists often dream of but rarely build. Why? Because in the West, activism is often professionalized, bureaucratized, and dependent on grants. In the Caucasus, however, it’s DIY powered by necessity.
Don’t Romanticize—But Don’t Ignore
None of this is to romanticize dysfunction. Corruption, nepotism, and weak rule of law are real problems in the South Caucasus. But what emerges in response is something remarkable: individuals who do not collapse when systems fail. They step up. They figure it out. They remember that liberty is not about comfort, but capacity.
The West, in its quest for equality of outcomes, has created layers of dependency that erode individual agency. But liberty without responsibility is hollow. And efficiency without freedom is brittle.
What the Caucasus teaches is not how to perfect society, but how to survive it and make it better, from the bottom up.
