Dr Elkhan Nuriyev is an Eastern Europe-Global Area (EEGA) Fellow at Leipzig University. From 2019 to 2020, he was a Humboldt Senior Fellow at the Centre for East European and International Studies (ZOiS) in Berlin. He is a Global Energy Associate at the Brussels Energy Club and a Senior Expert on Russia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia at L&M Political Risk and Strategy Advisory in Vienna. Born in Azerbaijan, he is also a long-time expert member of the Partnership for Peace (PfP) Consortium’s Study Group on Regional Stability in the South Caucasus at the George C Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. After receiving his PhD in Political Science from the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1996, Nuriyev joined the George Washington University (GWU) as a William Fulbright Scholar. Between 1997 and 2007, he worked as a senior research associate at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies (MIIS) in Monterey, the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars in Washington, DC, the Peace Research Institute in Frankfurt, and the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin. During 2008-2011, he served as the founding director of the Centre for Strategic Studies in Baku, and was also a Professor of Political Science at Western University. From 2014 to 2015, he first worked as a DAAD Senior Policy Fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP) and then was a Humboldt Senior Fellow at Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP) in Berlin.

His research interests include Russian foreign policy in the former Soviet states, European neighborhood policy and EU’s Eastern Partnership initiative, conflict resolution and peace building in Ukraine, Moldova and the South Caucasus countries, and energy security strategies in the wider Black Sea-Caspian region. He has been active as an international speaker at public and private universities, institutions and conferences in the USA, UK, France, Germany and elsewhere in Europe and throughout the world since 1994. He is the author of numerous publications on Eurasian affairs, including 4 books, 60 book chapters, 80 scholarly journal articles and over 600 opinion pieces in professional and popular media. His academic work has been published widely by Routledge, LIT, CEPS, Internationale Politik, Outre-Terre, and other publishers.