BEKA KOBAKHIDZE

Beka Kobakhidze received his PhD degree from Ivane Javakhishvili State University in Tblisli, Georgia, in 2015. He is a Professor and Co-chair of MA Program in Modern History of Georgia at Ilia State University.

Kobakhidze has also lectured at the Georgian Institute of Public Affairs (GIPA), the University of Georgia and the Caucasus University. In 2022 He was a Visiting Fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies of the Harvard University. In 2018-19, he was a Visiting Fellow of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Oxford. His research interests lie in the foreign policy of the Democratic Republic of Georgia (1918-1921) and the historical intersection between Russia and the Western Great Powers in the Caucasus and the contested regional history of the Caucasus of the 19th and 20th centuries. His ongoing research project is Paris 1919-1920: Independence of Georgia in the Political West. He was awarded a Presidential Grant for Young Scholars in 2012-2014, with an Open Society Georgia Foundation grant in 2014 and Shota Rustaveli National Science Foundation grant in 2018 and the Harvard Fellowship in 2022 that enabled his extensive research in the United Kingdom, United States, France, and elsewhere.

Simultaneously, Beka Kobakhidze has been pursuing his career in international organizations and public service: during 2009-2015 he was working for the European Union Monitoring Mission to Georgia (EUMM), from 2015 to 2019 he was a Head of Education and Professional Development Division at the Ministry of Defence of Georgia, during 2019-2022 he was working for the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE) Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine (SMM).

CONTACT

✉ beka.kobakhidze@iliauni.edu.ge