Senior Advisor & Acting Director Caucasus

Ms. Ewa Chylinski is currently based in Tbilisi, Georgia, as Acting Director for the ECMI Caucasus Regional Office. Ms. Chylinski was ECMI HQ deputy director from 2004-2011. Previous to this time, she was head of programmes for several years at the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights in Warsaw. She has an extensive background in practice-oriented research and field experience in nationalities and minority issues from the Caucasus, Eastern Europe and Central Asia. With special competencies in democratization and human and minority rights promotion and protection as well as in management and development of academic and other projects, her contribution is valuable to the action-oriented aspect of ECMI activities. In addition to her position at the ECMI Caucasus, she continues to advise ECMI on various programmes, including managing the ECMI Belarus project. As a trained linguist, she has brought the issue of language into the scope of ECMI research and action. Ms Chylinski is particularly engaged in the issue of ratification of the Council of Europe European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages among Council of Europe State parties. Her academic background includes Eastern Europe area studies and Middle East studies in her capacity of a former Assistant Professor and Researcher at the Institute of East-West Studies at the University of South Jutland, Denmark. She occasionally teaches courses at the University of Flensburg and lectures at other academic institutions in Europe and beyond.

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Communication Consultant

John Petersen has been consulting in communication matters since late 2011. He is running the firm TekstPetersen ДООЕЛ that is located in Skopje. Mr. Petersen has a long record in the European NGO sphere. He is the founder of the Association for Community Colleges (ACC). ACC pursues a certain idea of European political identity formation on a background of cultural European diversity. This made Mr. Petersen the pivotal point of several events and courses dealing with minority issues - many of them took place in the Danish-German borderland. As a professional communicator, Mr. Petersen also has experience in the industrial engineering industry. Mr. Petersen studied Journalism, Religion, History and Philosophy at universities in Lund, Frankfurt a.M and Aarhus.

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Project Leader/Editor

Following graduation from the Erasmus Mundus Master’s Course “Global Studies – A European Perspective” with his detailed thesis titled The War of Laws: South Ossetia’s Movement for Self-Determination Between the Russian and Georgian Fronts, Forrest joined the ECMI regional office in Tbilisi in April 2010. Following his internship, Forrest collaborated with Tom Trier, director of ECMI - Caucasus, and George Tarkhan-Mouravi, co-director of the Institute for Policy Studies in Tbilisi, in writing a monograph on Meskhetian Turks and their planned repatriation to Georgia. From August 2010 onwards, he has reconceptualized and redesigned the ‘ethnopolitical map’ project based at the ECMI headquarters in Flensburg as the new interactive research website titled the Minority Map and Timeline of Europe (MMTE). Forrest is also currently a research associate at the University of Leipzig and has undertaken extensive schooling in the Czech Republic, Poland, Germany, Japan and the United States with a concentration on pan-European issues, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe as well as the former Soviet Union.

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