A research associate at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Studies in Berlin and Professor at the Ilia State University, Tbilisi. He studied History and Philology in Tbilisi and Saarbrücken and completed his PhD at the Göttingen-University (2005). In addition to his research, he writes for the Georgian and German press about culture and politics in the post-Soviet space, especially Georgia. Editor at Ost-West Monitoring, a multilingual platform for debate and cultural exchange featuring information, analysis and contexts by experts and artists from Armenia, Belarus, Georgia and Moldova.
The current regime in Tbilisi – nominally led by Irakli Garibashvili but with oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili pulling the strings – marks a sea change in Georgia’s gradual pro-western path of development over the past thirty years. For all the faults of past governments, there is no precedent for the authoritarian turn underway since 2020.
