Network
The ECMI has extensive cooperation with multiple partners across Europe and beyond. It is in ongoing communication with its circle of partners and experts.
Advisory Council
- Dr. Jennifer Jackson Preece (Chairperson)
Associate Professor of Nationalism at the European Institute & Department of International Relations, London School of Economics and Political Science - Prof. Florian Bieber
Professor at The University of Graz and Centre for East European Studies, Graz - Mr. Boriss Cilevics
Deputy of the Saeima (Parliament of Latvia) and a member of the Latvian delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. - Prof. François Grin
Director of the Observatoire Langues Formation, University of Geneva, Switzerland. Professor of Economics at the School of Translation and Interpretation, University of Geneva, Switzerland - Prof. David J. Galbreath
Professor of International Security, University of Bath, UK - Prof. Rainer Hofmann
Co-Director of Wilhelm Merton Centre,
Professor at Johann-Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt - Prof. James Hughes
Professor of Political Science at London School of Economics, UK - Prof. Will Kymlicka
Professor, Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy at Queen's University, Kingston, Canada - Prof. Stefan Oeter
Professor of Law at the University of Hamburg, Germany and President of the Advisory Committee to the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ECRML) - Prof. John Packer
Professor of Law, Director, Human Rights Research and Education Centre, University of Ottawa, Canada - Prof. Levente Salat
Professor of Political Science at Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania - Dr. Gwendolyn Sasse
Director, Centre of East European and International Studies (Zentrum für Osteuropa- und internationale Studien, ZOiS), Berlin - Prof. David Smith
Professor of Baltic History and Politics, School of Social and Political Science, University of Glasgow, UK - Prof. Michal Vašečka
Bratislava International School of Liberal Arts (BISLA) and Bratislava Policy Institute (BPI), as well as Member of the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) - Prof. Stefan Wolff
Professor of International Security, University of Birmingham, UK
ECMI Consultants
Stanislav Černega
Academic Consultant
Stanislav got his master’s degree in European studies from the Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia. His research interests include minority language rights, multilingualism, national identity construction, national myths and narratives, and use of social media in civic engagement. He spent a semester at the Centre for Research on Ethnic Relations and Nationalism at the University of Helsinki and did his internship at the Institute for Minority Rights at EURAC in Bolzano, Italy.
Dr. Tamara Hoch
Academic Consultant
Dr Tamara Hoch obtained her PhD in 2014 at the Department of Society and Globalisation at Roskilde University in Denmark. Her thesis, entitled “Reinventing national minority rights through European Integration: from top-down to bottom-up Europeanisation” deals with changes in domestic policies pertaining to national minorities as triggered by the EU and the Council of Europe. At the same time, her thesis also considered how a changing European context influences actorness and self-identification among minority actors as they explore new levels and norms. As such her research is firmly rooted in contemporary European Studies, comparative politics and minority studies, and her knowledge is especially strong on minority rights within an EU context, which she has dealt with in most of her publications. Throughout her PhD, Tamara was involved in teaching within courses of EU-studies and Global studies at Roskilde University and she also spent a few months at Exeter University as a visiting researcher. Tamara also has experience with the ECMI, primarily by teaching within the European Minority Regime Seminar which is offered for the students of European Studies Master Programme at the European University of Flensburg. And she has also contributed with a chapter on Europeanisation and minority rights in Minority Issues in Europe: Rights, Concepts and Policy (2013), which is part of the course material for the aforementioned ECMI seminar. After completed PhD, Tamara has been involved in teaching at Roskilde University and the South Danish University (Odense) within courses on EU politics and Global Organisations. At the ECMI, she will be the editor of the Journal of Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe and she will also support the ongoing designation of the Minority Map and Timeline of Europe (MMTE).
Forrest Kilimnik
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.
Non-Resident Researchers
ECMI is honoured to work with a group of eminent young scholars in the field of Minority Studies. These scholars are affiliated with ECMI as non-resident Senior Research Associates while resident in their own capacity with some of Europe's and the world's best universities. They represent all the relevant disciplines as well as some of the best multi-disciplinary research in our area of work. They work with ECMI on research projects, contribute to ECMI publications and training programmes as well as participate in ECMI events in Flensburg and throughout Europe. These scholars also form the core of ECMI's roster of experts which is available for the media.
Please contact the ECMI Secretariat for contacts and further details.
Malte Brosig (South Africa)
Senior Non-resident Research Associate
Malte Brosig is an Associate Professor in International Relations at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. He holds a PhD from Portsmouth University and has published in the Journal of European Integration, International Peacekeeping and the European Foreign Affairs Review. He has also co-authored (together with T. Agarin) a volume on minority integration in Central Eastern Europe and is co-chairing the working group in human rights in the German Political Science Association.
Farimah Daftary (France/USA)
Senior Non-resident Research Associate
Farimah Daftary was recently a Minority Protection Program Officer for the EU Accession Monitoring Program (EUMAP) at the Open Society Institute in Budapest. As a (Senior) Research Associate at ECMI from 1997 to 2002, her research concerned various aspects of inter-ethnic relations and minority issues in Europe as well as the OSCE's 'human dimension'. She received her Masters of International Affairs (M.I.A.) with a specialisation in East Central Europe from the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), Columbia University, New York, N.Y.in 1991. She has published a number of articles on Corsica's autonomy arrangement, power-sharing in Macedonia and language issues in Slovakia. She has also co-edited two books: Nation-building, Ethnicity and Language Politics in Transition Countries (with François Grin) (Budapest: Open Society Institute/LGI, 2003) and Radical Ethnic Movements in Contemporary Europe (with Stefan Troebst) (Oxford/New York: Berghahn Books, 2003).
Robert Dunbar (Canada/UK)
Senior Non-resident Research Associate
Robert Dunbar is a Reader in Law at King's College, Aberdeen. He holds a B.A. from the University of Toronto in International Relations, an LL.B. from Osgoode Hall Law School (Canada) and an LL.M. from the London School of Economics, where he specialised in international law. He specialises in the rights of minorities, particularly linguistic minorities in both international law and in comparative legal contexts, and is particularly interested in minority language rights and legal regimes for the protection and promotion of minority languages and minority linguistic communities, and has published widely in a range of leading legal journals on such issues. He is an expert of the Council of Europe in respect of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages and the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, and is an expert on ECMI's Minority Ombudsperson Project. He has advised a range of NGOs in the UK on language matters, particularly in relation to the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, has prepared a report for the Kurdish Human Rights Project in respect of the linguistic rights of Kurdish speakers, and has worked with the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission's working group on language rights in Northern Ireland.
Eben Friedman (USA)
Senior Non-resident Research Associate
Eben Friedman holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, San Diego. His dissertation, “Explaining the Political Integration of Minorities: Roms as a Hard Case,” drew on two years of field research in Slovakia and Macedonia. After working as (Senior) Research Associate at ECMI’s headquarters in Flensburg from 2002 to 2005, he moved to Skopje, where he served as ECMI Regional Representative until 2007. From 2007 to 2012, he was Advisor on Policy Development to the Roma Education Fund, designing and leading policy studies and contributing to setting priorities for the organization’s activities in Southeastern Europe as well as in Czech and Slovak Republics. Since 2012, he has undertaken advisory, analytical, and research consultancies for organizations including the Council of Europe, the Open Society Foundations, OSCE/ODIHR, and UNDP. His publications have focused largely on ethnopolitics in Macedonia and on Roma.
Matteo Fumagalli (Scotland)
Senior Non-resident Research Associate
Matteo Fumagalli is Senior Lecturer in the School of International Relations at the University of St Andrews (UK). He received his PhD in Politics from the University of Edinburgh in 2005. He has previously taught at Central European University, University College Dublin, and the University of Edinburgh. Matteo’s interests lie at the intersection of the study of ethnic conflict and violence and the politics of natural resources, especially in authoritarian settings.
Matteo has conducted research in Central Asia (especially Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan), the Caucasus (esp. Georgia), Ukraine, Russia, East Asia (South Korea, China, Taiwan) and South-East Asia (Myanmar, Laos, Singapore, Vietnam and Cambodia).
Dr Claire Gordon (London)
Senior Non-resident Research Associate
Dr Claire Gordon has been working as a Teaching Fellow in East European Politics at the European Institute and Department of Government of the London School of Economics and Political Science since 2003. Her research interests include the EU’s eastward enlargement, minority policy and the role of conditionality; conflict management in post-communist states and the role of international organisations; and processes of democratisation in Central and Eastern Europe. From 2007-2009 she was a member of the LSE research team of the EU Framework VI project ‘Human and Minority Rights in the Life Cycle of Ethnic Conflicts'. Her recent publications include: The Stabilisation and Association Process in the Western Balkans: an effective instrument of post-conflict management? (2009) Ethnopolitics, September; EU Conditionality and the Protection of Minorities in the Post-Communist Region (2010) European Yearbook of Minority Issues; The EU and the Western Balkans: SAP as an instrument of regional stabilisation (2008) in Talani, Leila S, (ed.) EU and the Balkans: policies of integration and disintegration. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, pp. 85-126; The European neighbourhood policy: effective instrument for conflict management and democratic change in the Union's eastern neighbourhood? (2008) with Sasse, Gwendolyn, EURAC, Bolzano, Italy; Conflict settlement and the role of human and minority rights: Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia and Serbia (2007) EURAC, Bolzano, Italy; Europeanization and regionalization in the EU's enlargement to Central and Eastern Europe: the myth of conditionality. (2004) with Hughes, James and Sasse, Gwendolyn, Palgrave, Basingstoke, UK. ISBN 9781403939876. She is a member of the non-resident Senior Research Associate Network at the European Centre for Minority Issues, Flensburg.
Dr. Kristen Henrard (Belgium)
Senior Non-resident Research Associate
Kristin Henrard is senior lecturer at the University of Groningen where she teaches human rights, refugee law and constitutional law. She studied law at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, with special focus on human rights and international law. She graduated magna cum laude in 1994 and obtained an LLM degree at Harvard Law School in 1995 during which she further specialised in human rights and humanitarian law. Between 1995 and 1999 she conducted doctoral research and took her doctorate at the Catholic University of Leuven 17 September 1999. During these years she also worked at the Constitutional Court of South Africa as researcher for Judge Kriegler and monitored the South African constitutional negotiations in 1996 for the Flemish Government. Her main publications pertain to the areas of human rights and minority protection. Furthermore, Kristin Henrard is managing editor of the Netherlands International Law Review, member of the international advisory board of the Global Review of Ethnopolitics, chair of a working group on the political participation of minorities (ethnic autonomy) and country specialist on South Africa for Amnesty International - Dutch Section.
Dr. Priit Järve (Estonia)
Senior Non-resident Research Associate
Priit Järve is Estonian political scientist specialising in post-Soviet affairs. He graduated from Tartu University, Estonia, and completed his Ph.D. in 1972. He has worked in the Estonian Academy of Sciences in Tallinn, acted as the Plenipotentiary of the President to the Estonian Roundtable on Minorities, edited and contributed to the UNDP sponsored Estonian Human Development Reports of 1995, 1996, and 1997. In 1997 he joined the European Centre for Minority Issues in Flensburg, Germany, where he worked on Moldova, Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia and Kaliningrad oblast, Russia. He has published on democratisation of transitional societies, language policies, ethnic democracy and the institutional legacies of communism in the post-soviet area. Since 2004, Priit Järve has been an independent researcher.
Tomasz Kamusella (Scotland, United Kingdom)
Senior Non-resident Research Associate
Tomasz Kamusella is Lecturer in the School of History at the University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Scotland, United Kingdom. He was previously Assistant Professor at the Cracow University of Economics, Cracow, Poland; Thomas Brown Lecturer in Polish Studies in Trinity College Dublin; and Assistant Professor at the University of Opole, Opole, Poland. His English-language monographs include Silesia and Central European Nationalisms: The Emergence of National and Ethnic Groups in Prussian Silesia and Austrian Silesia, 1848-1918 (Purdue University Press 2007) and The Politics of Language and Nationalisms in Modern Central Europe (Palgrave 2009). He co-edited the two-volume collection Nationalisms Across the Globe (2005-2006, Poznan) and Nationalisms Today (Peter Lang 2009). He is currently working on his new project, The Atlas of Language Politics in Modern Central Europe, and co-edits for Peter Lang the book series, Nationalisms Across the Globe, which he founded in 2009. Time allowing, he would like to convert his extensive working paper, The Triple Division of the Slavic Languages: A Linguistic Finding, a Product of Politics, or an Accident? (2005, Vienna) into a full-fledged monograph. Since 1995, he has published widely, in English and Polish, on language politics, ethnicity and nationalism, European integration and history of Central Europe.
Dr. Martin Klatt (Sønderborg/Denmark)
Senior Non-resident Research Associate
Martin Klatt, born 1964 in Hamburg, Germany, is Associate Professor of Contemporary History at the Department of Border Region Studies, University of Southern Denmark. M. Klatt holds a BA in Business Administration from Business Academy Hamburg, an MA in Modern History, Political Science and Nordic Philology from Kiel University and a Ph.D. from University of Southern Denmark. Studies at Kiel University and University of Copenhagen, graduate student internship at Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Research Fellow at Schleswig-Holstein Institute for Peace Research, Ph.D. fellow at the Study Department of the Danish Central Library for South Schleswig, Flensburg. Since 2001 affiliated with the Danish Institute of Border Region Studies, Aabenraa, today Department of Border Region Studies in Sønderborg, Denmark. Network relevant research on the minorities in the Danish-German border region and on minorities and cross-border cooperation in Europe.
Dr. Zora Popova (Bulgaria)
Senior Non-Resident Research Associate
Dr. Zora Popova obtained her PhD degree from the University of Bath, UK. The focus of her research thesis “The role of social capital for post-ethnic-conflict reconstruction (Bosnia and Herzegovina)” is on the problem of re-building disintegrated societies. Zora Popova also has an MA degree in Cultural studies from the University of Sofia, Bulgaria (2000) and an MA degree in Southeast European Studies from the University of Athens, Greece (2001).
Dr. Popova has professional experience as a researcher and as a public policy analyst. She has been involved in number of research projects on topics like the New Security Challenges, Rise of the Extreme Right in Europe, Charismatic Leadership, Bulgaria and the European Political Values, etc. Between 2008 and 2012 she worked as an expert in the Unit for Alternative Prognoses, Analyses and Actions at the Administration of the President of Republic of Bulgaria. Since 2010 she has been an associate analyst and regular contributor to the online media for political, social and economic analyses ARGUMENTI.BG.
Dr. Reetta Toivanen (Finland)
Senior Non-Resident Research Associate
Dr. ReettaToivanen(b. 1969) is an Adjunct Professor for social and cultural anthropology and a Finnish Academy Research Fellow at the Erik Castren Institute for International Law and Human Rights at the University of Helsinki. She is also a non-resident senior research fellow at the European Centre for Minority Issues (Flensburg). She is involved as a Sociology Expert in the EU 7th Framework research Project ELDIA (European Language Diversity for All) and functions as the national coordinator of the EU’s Life-long learning project Qualirom (revitalizing Roma language). She is the National Expert on Finland in the Socio-economic Experts Network of the European Commission. After successfully completing her studies in Helsinki in 1994 (MA) and 1995 (Licentiate), she was awarded a doctoral degree at the Humboldt University Berlin in 2000. She was a post-doc fellow the Center of European Studies at Harvard University 2000-01 after which she worked 2000-03as a senior researcher at the Institute for Human Rights at ÅboAkademi. In 2003-07 she led a research project at the Humboldt University Berlin on human rights education and minorities. 2007-09 she was involved in Power in Finland research project as a senior researcherat the Centre for Research on Ethnic Relations and Nationalism and worked on Sámi and Roma in Finland. 2009-2010 she conducted research on terrorism expertise for the Centre of Excellence in Global Governance Research in Helsinki. She is member of the Editorial board for FAO Land Tenure Journal.
Toivanen’s major fields of research and expertise are ethnography, anthropology of law, human rights, ethnicity, ethnic and national minorities, anti-discrimination in Europe, anti-terrorism, human rights teaching, critical feminist theory.
Dr. Fernand de Varennes (Canada)
Senior Non-resident Research Associate
Former Director of the Asia-Pacific Centre for Human Rights and the Prevention of Ethnic Conflict. He is recognised as one of the world's leading legal experts on language rights and has written two seminal works on this topic. He also has extensive international recognition for his research work on international law, human rights, minorities and ethnic conflicts and has worked with numerous international organisations such as the United Nations, Working Group on the Rights of Minorities, UNESCO and the OSCE's High Commissioner on National Minorities on these issues. He has published five books and over fifty scientific articles and reports.
Balázs Vizi (Budapest)
Senior Non-resident Research Associate
Balázs Vizi graduated in law at the Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest) in 1999, he received his PhD degree in political science from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium) in 2006. He has specialized in international human and minority rights protection. From 2002 he works at the Research Institute of Ethnic and National Minorities of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and from 2004 he is a lecturer at the Department of International Law of the Faculty of Public Administration of Budapest Corvinus University. He is author of several publications on minority issues in the context of the European Union and co-editor of several books on minority rights protection.
Mitja Žagar (Ljubljana)
Senior Non-resident Research Associate
Mitja Žagar (Research Councilor at the Institute for Ethnic Studies and Full Professor at the Universities of Ljubljana and Primorska/Litoral) is a jurist and political scientist specialized in: Comparative Constitutional Law, Comparative Politics and Government, International Law, Human Rights, International Relations, Ethnic Studies, Diversity Management, Peace and Conflict Studies. His research and lecturing (in Slovenia and world-wide) has focused on international law and minority protection, comparative constitutional law and comparative politics and government, transition, democratic reforms, federalism, ethnic relations and diversity management – particularly in Eastern and South Eastern Europe (the Balkans), but also in other regions and globally.
