Areas of Expertise:
  • Conflicts in the Post-Soviet Space
  • Europeanization of the East European Neighborhood
  • Human and Minority Rights
  • International Law and de facto states

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 2015.

Selected publications:

• Together with Oleh Protsyk (Ed.), Managing Ethnic Diversity in Russia (New York: Routledge, 2013) –
• “Nationalism and Politics of the Past: The cases of Kosovo and Abkhazia”, 36(2) Review of Central and East European Law (2011), 53-77.
• “Preachers of Hatred and Deformation of History: The case of ethno-mobilization in Kosovo”, in Southeastern Europe, 34(1), 2010, 38-54.