In October 2025, Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze unveiled higher education reforms built on ‘one city, one faculty’ and a shorter three-plus-one degree structure. He claimed the reforms would optimise resources, raise teaching quality, and discourage unnecessary student migration abroad. Just five days later, he signed a decree abolishing the International Education Centre, which, since 2014, had funded Georgians’ postgraduate study at leading universities abroad.
Critics saw a broader shift.
Following Kobakhidze’s announcement, the Tbilisi-based research institute Gnomon Wise warned that the reform could move Georgia towards a centralised system in which the state controls university budgets, programmes, student numbers, and research priorities.
In February 2026, the local NGO the Social Justice Centre concluded that the reform had been drafted without adequate participation by the academic community and interfered with university autonomy and academic freedom.
The same month, a government decree cut student places at Ilia State University (ISU) — one of the country’s leading institutions with strong Western academic ties — by more than 90%, prompting protests by students and staff. Coming amidst growing hostility toward dissent within academia, the cut was widely perceived on campus as a politically motivated measure targeting institutional independence, with rector Nino Doborjginidze accusing the ruling Georgian Dream party of political pressure.
OC MediaTamuna Chkareuli
The government has framed such steps as a matter of sovereignty, with Parliamentary Speaker Shalva Papuashvili emphasising in April 2026 that sovereignty must be defended within institutions and societies, not only at borders.
The same logic runs through the amended Law on Grants, fast-tracked in February 2025. Under it, the government rejected the German Konrad Adenauer Foundation’s applications in July 2026, restricting an organisation that had supported democratic institution-building, youth education, civil society development, and Georgia’s European integration. The foundation said approval would have required projects at odds with its mission.
In August, Harvard’s Georgian Studies Programme, funded by Georgia’s education ministry, was suspended after that funding ended. The Harvard Georgian Studies Programme served to advance the research, teaching, and promotion of Georgia’s history, culture, and literature in the US, thereby strengthening international academic connections and enhancing the country's global visibility. The ministry cited disagreement over a development plan; ISU historian Beka Kobakhidze called the decision political.
This legislative tightening is directly linked to the Law on Transparency of Foreign Influence. By applying the same restrictive logic to independent academia as it did to NGOs, the government has extended its oversight into education.
The government argues that it is simply organising a fragmented university system and protecting national sovereignty. However, the sequence of decisions challenges this narrative. While the official goal is framed around administrative efficiency, enrolment cuts would logically be spread across duplicated programmes nationwide, rather than concentrated on a single institution. Similarly, an emphasis on educational quality directly contradicts the abolition of the agency that sent students to the world’s top universities. Furthermore, had the primary objective been transparency, the amended Law on Grants would require clear disclosure guidelines, rather than granting the state broad discretion to reject foundations that had worked openly in Georgia for more than two decades.
OC MediaTeona Sekhniashvili
It seems clear that the underlying aim is to bring independent academia under state control. Independent universities are a challenge for an increasingly autocratic government because they encourage critical thinking, organised student movements, and research the state does not direct. The concentrated cut at ISU, the closure of the study-abroad agency, and the new grants regime all point the same way: fewer independent spaces, and more state discretion over who teaches, who studies, and with whom.
Meanwhile, new partnerships have been signed by the Georgian government: a Chinese-language memorandum in Beijing in early June, an education memorandum with Kyrgyzstan on 12 June, and an agreement to strengthen education cooperation with Turkey on 2 October.
Yet, these agreements are likely to serve mainly as a political facade, allowing a retreat to be presented as diversification. While each of these nations maintains its own valid educational priorities and regional strengths, their newly signed bilateral agreements with Georgia are narrowly focused — such as language teacher training or general exchange frameworks — and lack the institutional depth found in long-standing Western networks. Consequently, even if fully implemented, these initiatives cannot systematically replicate or replace the specific academic standards, comprehensive research funding, and global mobility opportunities that Western institutions have historically integrated into Georgia’s education system. The quality of education shapes a country’s economy, institutions, and resilience. For Georgia with an occupying neighbour, this is a question of national security, not only education policy.
At the same time, these developments benefit Russia. There is no evidence that Moscow directed them, but the sequence is notable.
In December 2024, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree officially classifying ‘Russophobia’, the ‘falsification of history’, and Western influence as national security threats while establishing the post-Soviet space — including the South Caucasus and Central Asia — as a strategic priority where educational and cultural alignment is treated as a matter of state security. The decree also claims that foreign organisations use educational and humanitarian projects to inspire protest.
Two months later, Georgian Dream fast-tracked its Law on Grants on a similar premise, made a series of visits to Central Asia, and the Adenauer Foundation, deregistered by Russia in 2022, was pushed out of Tbilisi.
Again, there is no direct evidence that Moscow, or any other foreign government, ordered these steps. But they might serve Russia’s strategic interests, and those of any other power that would prefer a new generation of Georgians less tied to the West. After all, distance from Western academia means distance from the places where Russia is studied critically.
OC MediaEduard Marikashvili
Already, the changes are being made apparent.
In Central Asia, Russia builds influence directly by funding Russian-language schools in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. In Georgia, where Russian troops occupy two regions, that model cannot work, but an adapted version is already visible. In July 2026, Georgian schoolchildren joined the Russian–Belarusian ‘Memory Train’ with peers from CIS countries, along a route built around a shared memory of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ — how Russia refers to World War II. At the closing ceremony in Minsk, the Deputy Chair of the Federation Council — Russia’s senate — Konstantin Kosachev called them future ‘ambassadors of goodwill’ who could restore Georgian–Russian friendship.
Worse consequences are already on their way.
First, shrinking independent spaces for critical thinking produces passive citizens, and democracy erodes from below.
Second, a system that stops producing strong researchers, policy analysts, and technical specialists leaves the state without the expertise to recognise and counter domestic or foreign vulnerabilities, while those who can will leave, taking the country’s development with them.
Third, removing the West from the education system creates a vacuum that authoritarian states, Russia first among them, can fill over time.
Georgia has seen this before: Soviet education once tried to reshape national history and memory to fit Moscow’s narrative. But it did not fully succeed. On 14 April 1978, when the Soviet authorities moved to strip Georgian of its status as the state language, students filled Tbilisi’s streets and Moscow was forced to retreat. That memory matters now.
Georgia once fought to preserve its national identity against imperial domination. Today, that struggle continues through the education, historical consciousness, and intellectual independence of the generations on which the country’s long-term security and sovereignty depend.