Nino Kemoklidze

Biography

Dr Kemoklidze first joined CREES in 2009 as a PhD student. Her thesis – “Identity and Violence: Cases in Georgia” – examined the question of how violence ‘came about’ in Georgia in the early 1990s by looking at the link between identity construction and the outbreak of violence. Using previously unpublished archival material and more than 50 extensive, in-depth ethnographic interviews, she traced the process of the development of inter-ethnic relations in Abkhazia and South Ossetia over the decades and provided a detailed examination of how conflicting group identities were constructed and how inter-ethnic relations evolved from tensions to violence. In the course of her academic career she has studied and worked at a number of other universities across the world including Australia, Georgia, Norway, Sweden, the United States and the UK. Most recently, the research she completed for her PhD thesis spanned four countries - and in addition to the work undertaken at the University of Birmingham, she spent eight months in Georgia for fieldwork, 10 months at the Norwegian Institute of Foreign Affairs (NUPI) in Oslo during 2010-11 for research and a year at Uppsala Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies (UCRS) in Sweden in 2013. Her stays at NUPI and Uppsala University were funded by two prestigious scholarships: Yggdrasil–Young Guest and Doctoral Researchers' Annual Scholarship for Investigation and Learning in Norway (project #202697/V11), and Visby Programme for PhD and Post-Doctoral Studies in Sweden. Dr Kemoklidze is a recipient of numerous other awards and scholarships, including the inaugural Oslo Peace Scholarship for her MA degree in International Relations with Peace and Conflict Studies specialisation at the Australian National University (with a semester at PRIO). She received the OSI/FCO–Chevening/University of Edinburgh scholarship for her MSc degree in Nationalism Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She also holds an Academic Degree of a Certified Specialist in Economic Law and a BA degree in the History of Diplomacy and International Relations from Georgia. Before her academic career Dr Kemoklidze was a diplomat and worked as a Diplomatic Attaché at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Georgia. Previously, she worked for the Refugee Programme at the Hungarian Helsinki Committee in Budapest. In addition to her native Georgian, Dr Kemoklidze speaks English, Russian, and a bit of Spanish, and has rather unsuccessfully attempted to learn Hungarian.

Research Interest

(National) Self-Determination and Secession Ethnic Conflicts and Violence Nationalism Studies Geographic areas of interest include (but are not limited to) the former Soviet space (especially the Caucasus, Moldova, Ukraine); South and South-East Asia; the Pacific.