Theorizing small states’ non-alignment strategies under great power rivalry: How Georgia navigates being caught between a rock and a hard place

The article theorizes how neutrality, hedging, and sheltering benefit small states and help them to navigate great power rivalries within buffer complexes. We analyze Georgia’s foreign policy, showing how it evolved from balancing against Russia through Euro–Atlantic alignment to adopting a more flexible combination of the three non-alignment strategies. Contrary to realist expectations and recent small state theorization, Georgia’s case reveals that small states do not always follow fixed grand strategies or simply bandwagon or balance. Driven by a combination of domestic and external factors, they can adopt adaptive, overlapping approaches to remain unaligned amid intensifying geopolitical competition. Utilizing a game theoretical approach the study contributes both theoretically and empirically to the understanding of small state agency in buffer zones and challenges assumptions in International Relations about their limited strategic options in great power rivalries.