PhD Researcher Octavius Pinkard recently participated in an observation mission with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which is the world’s largest regional security organization. Attached to the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), he was deployed as part of the official OSCE/ODIHR delegation to observe the presidential election in Kyrgyzstan which took place on 15 October. Octavius was seconded to the mission by the US Department of State. Recent assignments have included Belarus, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, multiple deployments to Moldova and a previous assignment to Kyrgyzstan. Octavius’ research focuses on transformations in identity development and projection among Lebanese diaspora communities in the United States and Senegal. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Visiting Researcher at both the Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies at SOAS (University of London), and the Institute for Migration Studies at the Lebanese American University in Beirut. He is supervised by Dr. Amanda Klekowski von Koppenfels and Dr. Yvan Guichaoua.
