Engagement with de facto states: The need for a comprehensive EU policy framework for the South Caucasus

Engagement with de facto states: The need for a comprehensive EU policy framework for the South Caucasus

Tuesday, April 25, 2017
12:00pm - 1:30pm
Metropolitan Building, Room 5145

In this presentation, a critical analysis of wrong dichotomies and ideologies on statehood and sovereignty will be provided by problematizing the case of the de facto states of the South Caucasus. While international law is in a position to accommodate for unrecognized entities, widespread state practice still denies providing significant encounters to secessionist entities. Taking Abkhazia as an example, different ways how to “fudge” sovereignty and how the EU may engage with unrecognized entities will be discussed.

Benedikt Harzl is an Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation Fellow in Central European Studies at Johns Hopkins University SAIS. Prior to his engagement at SAIS, he was based as Head of Research at the Austrian Study Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution (ASPR) in Stadtschlaining. Since September 2016, he holds 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, Harzl worked in various research institutions across Europe: in 2006, he worked at the Institute for European Studies in Minsk (Belarus), at the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin in 2007, and at the European Academy in Bolzano/Bozen (Italy) in 2007-2012. While the University of Graz is Harzl’s alma mater (law), in 2010 he completed the MA program in East European Studies at the Free University of Berlin. 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 has completed at the Law Faculty of the University of Frankfurt in 2016.