Georgia’s ethnocultural landscape has undergone fundamental and multidimensional transformation over the past three decades. This transformation is the product of the interplay between post-Soviet transition, globalization, internal demographic mobility, and complex geopolitical realities. It extends well beyond surface-level cultural change, encompassing deep reconfigurations of social structures, identity politics, collective memory, and cultural practices. Adequate analysis of these processes requires an interdisciplinary methodological framework in which empirical data from ethnological fieldwork are synthesized with the theoretical instruments of sociological analysis, demographic statistics, and the conceptual models of cultural anthropology.

Four principal dimensions of this transformation are examined: (1) urbanization and cultural hybridization, with Tbilisi as a multiethnic laboratory in which diverse ethnocultural groups interact and generate new hybrid forms; (2) the experience of approximately 280,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) from Abkhazia and the Tskhinvali region, analyzed through the lens of collective memory, intergenerational trauma transmission, and adaptive identity formation; (3) the transnational dimensions of international labor migration, including the cultural practices of diaspora communities and their role in preserving and renegotiating Georgian ethnic identity; and (4) the role of digital media and social platforms in constructing, representing, and commodifying ethnocultural identities, including the ambivalent effects of ethno-tourism and the commercialization of cultural heritage.

Drawing on a multi-method approach that integrates systematic literature review, official statistical data (Geostat, World Bank, UNHCR, UNFPA), and existing ethnographic fieldwork, the study demonstrates that ethnocultural change in contemporary Georgia is neither linear nor unidirectional. Traditional identities are simultaneously preserved, hybridized, and redefined through the ongoing negotiation between memory and modernity, locality and transnationalism, authenticity and commodification.