“They don’t admit it officially, but everyone knows those guys work for the company. And they are very aggressive toward us strikers,” thirty-year-old trade unionist Tamar Ansiani explains. She’s nodding toward a group of men standing guard between the picket line and her workplace. They are all dressed in black, with some of them also masked. Ansiani and her comrades refer to them as “zonders.” A polemical derivative of the Nazi-era term “Sonderkommandos,” it means groups of plain-clothed men, hired to intimidate political opponents.

The concept isn’t unique to Georgia. During Ukraine’s Maidan revolution of 2014, similar outfits, known there as “titushky,” picked fights with anti-government protesters. It isn’t entirely new in Georgia either. Over a decade ago, when the neoliberal, pro-Western reformer Mikheil Saakashvili was cracking down on protesters, zonders were part of his repertoire of repression.

But in a sign of how little the political culture has changed, despite the former opposition party, Georgian Dream, having ruled the country for the past twelve years, “zonders” have recently made a comeback. In the spring, during mass demonstrations against the government’s so-called Foreign Agent Law, zonders suspected of working for the authorities beat up protesters in the cover of night. “It’s the same thing as during the protests,” says Ansiani’s coworker and fellow striker, Kamil Azimovi, who was beaten up by masked men out front his home in September. He thinks the attack was meant to intimidate him into discontinuing his participation in the strike. But the deployment of zonders in defense of a Western corporation, against striking workers, is a novelty — one that highlights what is obscured by the geopolitical cliches currently dominating its public discourse.