Eastern Voices: Europe’s East Faces an Unsettled West

Chapter 1: The Rise of Threatened Majorities
Ivan Krastev

Chapter 2: What Ukraine Should Demand of Itself and of the West
Natalie Jaresko

Chapter 3: The Preconditions for, and the Nature of, Current Ukrainian Reforms
Ihor Burakovsky

Chapter 4: Ukraine's Foreign Policy and the Role of the West
Oleksiy Haran and Petro Burkovskiy

Chapter 5: Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic Aspirations: Between Protracted Integration and Managing Expectations
Kornely Kakachia

Chapter 6: Whither the South Caucasus?
Thomas de Waal

Chapter 7: Stepping up the EU’s Engagement in the Conflicts of the Caucasus
Benedikt Harzl

Chapter 8: Azerbaijan’s Foreign Policy: What Role for the West in the South Caucasus?
Anar Valiyev

Chapter 9: Transparency and Rule of Law as Key Priorities for Armenia
Stepan Grigoryan and Hasmik Grigoryan

Stepan Grigoryan is Chairman of the Board of the Analytical Centre on Globalization and Regional Cooperation (ACGRC) in Armenia. He has served as advisor to the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Armenia and was a Member of the Armenian Parliament from 1990–1995.

Daniel S. Hamilton is the Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation Professor and and Founding Director of the Center for Transatlantic Relations at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). From 2002–2010 he served as the Richard von Weizsäcker Professor at SAIS. From 2001–2015 he also served as Executive Director of the American Consortium for EU Studies. He has held a variety of senior positions in the U.S. Department of State, including Deputy Assistant Secretary for European Affairs; U.S. Special Coordinator for Southeast European Stabilization; Associate Director of the Policy Planning Staff for two U.S. Secretaries of State; and Director for Policy in the Bureau of European Affairs. In 2008 he served as the first Robert Bosch Foundation Senior Diplomatic Fellow in the German Foreign Office. He is or has been an advisory board member for 11 different European foundations and think tanks, including a number in eastern Europe. He has authored over 100 articles, books, and other commentary on international affairs, and has also taught at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, the University of Innsbruck, and the Free University of Berlin. From 1990–1993 he was Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and from 1982–1990 Deputy Director of the Aspen Institute Berlin. He has a PhD and MA with distinction from Johns Hopkins University SAIS. Recent publications include (with Stefan Meister, eds) The Eastern Question: Russia, the West, and Europe’s Grey Zone (2016).

Olexiy Haran is Professor and Founding Director of the School of Policy Analysis at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. He is also Research Director of the Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation in Kyiv. In 2005–2006 he served as the Eurasia Foundation’s Vice President for Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova. He graduated from the Department of International Relations at Kyiv University in 1981 and received his Ph.D in 1996. He is the author many articles and books, including Ukraine in Europe: Questions and Answers, and is a frequent commentator for international media. He is a Member of the Program on New Approaches to Research and Security (PONARS-Eurasia).

Benedikt Harzl is an Austrian lawyer and political scientist. In 2016–2017 he was an Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation Fellow in Central European Studies at the Center for Transatlantic Relations at Johns Hopkins University SAIS. Prior to his engagement at SAIS, he served as Head of Research at the Austrian Study Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution (ASPR) in Stadtschlaining. Since September 2016, he has held a tenure track professorship in law at the University of Graz, where he has worked since 2012 as a university researcher at the Russian East European Eurasian Studies Centre (REEES) in the Law Faculty of the University of Graz. Before coming to the University of Graz, he worked in various research institutions across Europe: in 2006 at the Institute for European Studies in Minsk; in 2007 at the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin; and at the European Academy in Bolzano/Bozen (Italy) in 2007–2012. His principal research interests include post-Soviet state engineering, ethnic conflicts in the post-Soviet space, Russian foreign policy and the EU’s engagement in Eastern Europe. He focuses on the conflict dynamics of ethnic tension in the South Caucasus with emphasis on the Georgian- Abkhazian conflict. This was also the subject of his Ph.D. thesis, which he completed at the Law Faculty of the University of Frankfurt in 2015. He also holds an MA in East European Studies from the Free University of Berlin.

Natalie Jaresko is Executive Director of the Federal Fiscal Control Board of Puerto Rico. She served as Ukraine’s Minister of Finance from 2014–2016. Between 2005 and 2010 she was a member of President Viktor Yushchenko’s Foreign Investors Advisory Council and the Advisory Board of the Ukrainian Center for Promotion of Foreign Investment under the auspices of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine. In 2006 she co-founded Horizon Capital, where she served as a Managing Partner and Chief Executive Officer, which took over the management of the Western NIS Enterprise Fund (WNISEF), of which she had been President and Chief Executive Officer since 2001. She served as the first Chief of the Economic Section of the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine from 1992–1995, and in various economic positions at the State Department in Washington, D.C. from 1989–1992. She has also been a governor of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

Kornely Kakachia is professor of Political Science at Ivane Javakishvili Tbilisi State University and Director of the Georgian Institute of Politics in Tbilisi. His current research focuses on Georgian domestic and foreign policy, security issues of the wider Black Sea area and comparative party politics. He was a recipient of IREX and OSI fellowships and was a visiting fellow at Harvard University’s Black Sea Security program (2009–2010); the Harriman Institute at Columbia University (2011) and Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. He is the co-editor of Georgian Foreign Policy: The Quest for Sustainable Security (2014).

Ivan Krastev is chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies, Sofia, permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, and 2013–2014 Richard von Weizsäcker fellow at the Robert Bosch Stiftung in Berlin. He is a founding board member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the advisory board of the ERSTE Foundation, a member of the advisory council of the Center for European Policy Analysis, and the European Cultural Foundation. He is also associate editor of Europe’s World and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Democracy and Transit—Europäische Revue. From 2004 to 2006, he was the executive director of the International Commission on the Balkans chaired by the former Italian Prime Minister Giuliano Amato. He was the editor-in-chief of the Bulgarian Edition of Foreign Policy and was a member of the Council of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, London (2005–2011). Books in English include After Europe (UPenn Press, 2017), Democracy Disrupted. The Global Politics of Protest (UPenn Press, 2014), In Mistrust We Trust: Can Democracy Survive When We Don’t Trust Our Leaders? (TED Books, 2013); and The Anti-American Century, co-edited with Alan McPherson (CEU Press, 2007).

Stefan Meister is the head of the Robert Bosch Center for Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia at the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP). Previously he worked as a senior policy fellow on the European Council on Foreign Relations’ Wider Europe Team and as a senior research fellow at the DGAP (2008–2013). He has been engaged in research and work on Russia and the post-Soviet countries for nearly 20 years. He is a member of the Valdai Club, the Yalta European Strategy and the Astana Club and was Fellow at the Transatlantic Academy on Russia in 2015–2016. His areas of research focus include Russian domestic, foreign, and energy policy; Ukraine and Belarus; EU-Russia relations; Russia’s policy toward post-Soviet countries; and Russian disinformation. He has served several times as an election observer for the OSCE in post-Soviet countries and was responsible for educational projects in Russia. In 2003–2004 he was researcher-in-residence at the Center for International Relations in Warsaw, analyzing Polish Eastern policy. He earned his doctorate at the University of Jena and holds an MA in political science and East European history. His PhD thesis was on the “Transformation of the Russian Higher Education System.” He edited a volume on Russia’s policy towards post-Soviet countries (with Nomos publisher) in 2013, and he writes extensively on Germany’s Russia policy, conflicts in the post-Soviet region (especially the South Caucasus), the interrelationship between Russian domestic and foreign policy, as well as on the EU’s Eastern Partnership. In 2014 he was part of the steering committee that drafted a new German Russia policy for the planning staff of the German Foreign Office. Recent publications include (with Daniel S. Hamilton, eds) The Eastern Question: Russia, the West, and Europe’s Grey Zone (2016).

Dzianis Melyantsou is a senior analyst at the Belarusian Institute for Strategic Studies. He is an editor of the Belarus Foreign Policy Index—a monitoring of Belarus’s foreign policy developments. His research interests include international relations, Belarus-EU relations, and international security.

Hans Martin Sieg is director of the offices of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung in Romania and the Republic of Moldova. He was Chief Strategy Advisor to the prime minister of Moldova from 2013 to 2015. He has been active as an advisor to German and international governmental and non- governmental organizations and was a foreign policy advisor in the German Bundestag. He holds doctorates in history and political science and has taught security policy, European integration, and EU foreign relations at the Viadrina European University Frankfurt/Oder, the Free University of Berlin, and the University of Passau. He is an associate fellow at the Robert Bosch Center for Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia at the German Council on Foreign Relations.

Anar Valiyev is Assistant Professor at ADA University in Azerbaijan. He received his Bachelor’s degree in History from Baku State University (1999) and Master’s degree in History (2001) from the same university. From 2001 to 2003 he studied public policy at School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University in Bloomington, where he received his second master’s degree. In 2007 he successfully defended his dissertation at the School of Urban and Public Affairs at the University of Louisville. From 2007 to 2008 he served as assistant professor at the Faculty of Social Studies of Masaryk University in Brno, in the Czech Republic. In 2016- 2017 he was a Fulbright Visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins University SAIS.