Octavius Pinkard, a PhD Researcher at BSIS, was recently part of the delegation sent by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to monitor the presidential runoff in Georgia. The OSCE is the world’s largest regional security institution. Octavius was seconded to the mission by the US Department of State, and was deployed to Kakheti, with regional briefings and debriefings in Telavi. There were 25 candidates in the first round of balloting (held 28 October), and the runoff between the top two finishers was held on 28 November. This was an historic election for multiple reasons. The victory by Salome Zurabishvili marks the first time that a female has ever been elected president of a country in the Caucasus region. A constitutional change in 2017 means that this election will also be the last time that citizens directly elect the president. In the future, the president will be chosen indirectly by parliament. In a break with tradition, President Zurabishvili was inaugurated in Telavi, not in the capital city, Tbilisi.
Octavius engages in research on conflict-generated diasporas. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley and a Visiting Researcher at SOAS (University of London). During his 11 months of fieldwork in Lebanon, he spent a period of 4 months as a Visiting Researcher at Lebanese American University in Beirut. He is often recruited by the US Department of State to participate in observation missions of the OSCE, including assignments to Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Moldova, and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.