Acts of disobedience are exploding in the streets of Georgia.

In the capital city of Tbilisi, the gates of the Parliament building have been battered, its windows smashed and burning objects thrown through. For more than a week, Rustaveli Avenue, the city’s central street, has been a nightly battleground of tear gas and pyrotechnics. Anti-government protesters hurl fireworks that explode over the heads of the special forces and the lights of laser pointers swarm like insects. People pry off anything that will come loose — benches, plant pots, construction hoarding — and feed it into makeshift fires or onto barricades.

The state responds with water cannons and tear gas, which seeps down the avenue, stinging our eyes and throats.

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Each day authorities move in to clear the detritus of rage from the streets. The walls of Parliament are covered with several layers of black paint as the ruling party hastily conceals the words of anger and blame that were written there the night before and will probably be written again the next night. Some protesters carry their messages on signs, like the ones pictured above. The sign on the left reads, “Tbilisi State Academy of Art students with all our souls toward Europe.”

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I was a child during the brief war between Georgia and Russia in 2008. I remember seeing charred buildings in the eastern town of Gori and tanks on the Military Highway, a road that enters Georgia from Russia. People of my generation have grown up under the fear of another war, and Georgian Dream, the political party that has been in power since 2012, has capitalized on that fear, running on a platform of peace while seeming to follow the Kremlin playbook with laws against what is described as L.G.B.T.Q. propaganda, “foreign agents” laws and a “reorganization” of arts institutions. When the elections in October ended in Georgian Dream’s favor amid allegations of vote rigging and after months of failed protests, nihilism and fatigue set in. It felt like we were sleepwalking into becoming a Russian vassal state.

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