Speaker
Natalie
Sabanadze
Position
Natalie Sabanadze became Georgia's ambassador to Belgium, Luxembourg and the head of the Georgian mission to the European Union in May, 2013. Prior to assuming her current position, Sabanadze worked as the senior advisor to the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities in The Hague. She held a number of posts with the OSCE HCNM, including head of Central and South East Europe section and more recently, head of Eastern Europe, Caucasus and Central Asia section.
Born 31 August 1975, Sabanadze studied at Swarthmore and Mount Holyoke Colleges in the United States, before obtaining her Master's in International Relations with distinction at the London School of Economics in 1999. Sabanadze then served as political officer at the US Embassy in Tbilisi. In 2005, she completed her doctorate in Politics and International Relations at Oxford University, where she was a Dulverton Scholar. She has held visiting research fellowships at the European Centre for Minority Issues in Flensburg, Germany and at the Universidad de Deusto in Bilbao, Spain.
Sabanadze has written and lectured extensively on questions of post-communist transition, political theory, nationalism, ethnic conflict and national minorities. In 2009 she published a book Globalisation and Nationalism: The Cases of Georgia and Basque Country and in 2010 co-edited a volume with Francesco Palermo National Minorities in Inter-State Relations.