Board of
Advisors

Oliver Reisner is a professor in European and Caucasian Studies, Jean Monnet Chair (09/2016 – 08/ 2019) at Ilia State University Tbilisi (Georgia). He received his Dr. phil. degree in Eastern European History for a thesis on the formation of the Georgian national movement at Georg-August-University Gottingen in 2000. Then he coordinated the first post-graduate MA programme “Central Asia / Caucasus” at Humboldt University Berlin (2000-2003), managed an EU-funded civic integration project “Intercommunal Centre for Youth” (EIDHR) with World Vision International (2003-2005) and worked as operations manager at the Delegation of the European Union to Georgia (2005-2015) being in charge of culture, education, youth, minorities and of monitoring and evaluation of the EU-Georgia cooperation. Recently, he published articles on Europeanisation, religion and the specifics of civil society in Georgia. He authored the biannual Georgia country reports for the Bertelsmann Transformation Index since 2016. He was a board member of the “Association of European Studies for the Caucasus” (AESC) and a member of the advisory council of the “European Journal of Minority Issues” (EJM). He published a monograph and 28 papers in German, Georgian and English journals as well as in several volumes so far. Currently, he is leading a research project “In Search of Social Cohesion in Minor Urban Settings of Georgia” (Rustaveli National Science Foundation). Finally, he is co-editor of the series “Caucasian Studies” at Reichert Verlag Wiesbaden.