| dc.description.abstract | Since the 2003 Rose Revolution, the Republic of Georgia has undergone political upheavals as part of aspiring to become a more modern and Western nation. The recovery from a transition to capitalism and Georgia’s geopolitical conflicts involving Russia, however, have proven obstructing factors in this prolonged endeavour. Based on approximately 5,5 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Batumi, a cosmopolitan city within the Autonomous Republic of Ajara, the thesis is concerned with how the Georgian youth generation currently relates to the United States as an epitomised notion of the West. The U.S. diplomatic presence in Georgia is significant relative to other former Soviet republics: since the late 1990s, it has contributed to socio-economic development, aid assistance, and nurtured good bilateral relations. The case study’s institutional locality is the Batumi American Corner (BAC), a local branch of the American Corners Program which serves the overarching purpose of U.S. public diplomacy: to build mutual understanding between the countries in key areas such as culture, English language, and education. Through the use of both participant observation and in-depth interviews, I investigate how my informant group experience and thus conceptualise the United States based upon their regular participation in club sessions held by American expatriates and other activities. As I argue, American culture is not the only reason why my informants decide to spend their time there: they utilise the BAC as a social arena to e.g. practice their English speaking level and build a range of skills. Moreover, by considering the BAC as a stimulating environment which conveys Western ideals the institution also serves an U.S. agenda of influencing Georgian youth in a pro-Western direction. But while the informants conceptualise the United States as a country in which they can live out everyday desires, related to their situation as youths, influential political and moral structures contribute to elicit ambivalence in their views. In reference to relevant empirical studies and secondary sources, I show that this ambivalence is not only a local phenomenon, but which can be transferred to other structural levels. Being an inherent traditional and orthodoxly religious society, Georgia remains a complex buffer zone between East and West. By providing comparative approaches including the history of Western presence in Ajara and local adults’ life histories about their adolescence, the thesis aims to open a thoroughly contextualised perspective on how the Georgian youth generation currently relates to the United States and the West, situated in a part of the world that is turning more unstable. | eng |