Gender · War · Migration · Authoritarianism
I study the intersections of gender, war, migration, and authoritarianism, examining how political violence reshapes identity and belonging across borders.
Gvantsa Gasviani is a scholar of gender, war, migration, and authoritarianism, whose work examines how political violence reshapes identity and belonging across borders. She holds a PhD in Global and International Studies from the University of California, Irvine, where her dissertation, Politics of Gendered Death, traces how Russian men who left after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine are recast as political and gendered failures.
Her research has appeared in the International Journal of Interdisciplinary Global Studies, the Journal of Feminist Scholarship, and Caucasus International. She is a 2025 California State University Pre-Professor Program (PREPP) Fellow, and works across Georgian, English, and Russian.
Graduate spotlight on her research and fieldwork in Georgia and on UC Irvine’s inaugural Global Studies PhD cohort.
Read the feature →A research profile exploring how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reverberates across post-Soviet communities.
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What happens when refusing to fight a war is framed not as a moral stand but as a betrayal of masculinity itself? This dissertation examines how Russian men who left after the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine are constructed as both political and gendered failures. While exile is often understood as a legal or geographic condition, I argue that in the Russian context, it also operates as a tool of gender discipline. Through state media, propaganda, and popular discourse, Russian men in exile are portrayed not simply as conscientious objectors but as morally deviant, feminized, and queer-coded figures who have forfeited their claims to societal and state-recognized masculinity.
Drawing on ethnographic interviews, participant observation, and media analysis, this project introduces the concept of the politics of gendered death: a media-driven process through which narratives, satire, and viral circulation recode refusal to participate in state-defined masculinity and war-making as a failure of manhood. It also theorizes a “post-performative” shift in the Russian state’s approach to loyalty — where, today, the state demands full emotional and embodied allegiance.
Focusing on Russian exiles in Georgia, a country shaped by its postcolonial relationship with Russia, this dissertation shows how masculinity becomes both a target of authoritarian violence and a fragile claim to legitimacy in exile.
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