Plenary Roundtable

Vello Pettai will serve as a moderator of the plenary roundtable. Vello is the Director of the European Centre for Minority Issues in Flensburg, Germany. Prior to joining the ECMI in 2020, he was Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Tartu, where he worked on post-communist democratic development, ethnic politics and transitional justice. For many years he served as a Regional Manager for the Varieties of Democracy network. He is currently researching the impact of EU enlargement on national minorities. 

Ketevan Gurchiani will serve as a speaker at the plenary roundtable. Ketevan is the Professor of Anthropology and head of the Research Center for Cultural Anthropology at Ilia State University, Tbilisi, Georgia. Her primary research focuses on urban anthropology, the environment, and informal resistance. Additionally, she explores themes such as migration and peace practices. 

Dumitru Minzarari will serve as a speaker at the plenary roundtable. Dumitru is a Lecturer in Security Studies in the Department of Political and Strategic Studies at the Baltic Defence College. His research interests focus on modern warfare, determinants of military strategy, interstate conflict below the threshold of conventional war, including “hybrid warfare”, Russian foreign and security policies, and NATO deterrence on its eastern flank. Before joining the Baltic Defence College, he was a research associate with the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin (SWP), covering Russia’s domestic, foreign and security policies. He was also both a fellow and visiting scholar with the research division of the NATO Defense College in Rome. Dr. Minzarari’s policy experience includes working as a senior political advisor to the head of Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) mission in Kyrgyzstan, holding expert positions with the OSCE field missions in Georgia and Ukraine and consulting the Moldovan government on security sector reform. He received his PhD in political science from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and his MA in international affairs from Columbia University in New York. 

Oleksii Kolesnykov will serve as a speaker at the plenary roundtable. Oleksii is a Research Fellow at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies, University of Tartu. He holds a PhD in Political Science (2011) and previously worked as a lecturer and researcher at the Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Yuriy Fedkovych Chernivtsi National University. Subsequently, he served as a policy analyst and later as the head of the Association for Community Self-Organization Assistance – a leading Ukrainian think tank dedicated to local governance, democracy, and civic engagement. In addition, over six years, as an expert of the EU-funded Association4U project, has assisted the Office of the Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine for European and Euro-Atlantic and the Government Office for Coordination of European and Euro-Atlantic Integration.