Temur Iakobashvili

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Temur Iakobashvili (Georgian: თემურ იაკობაშვილი, also transliterated as Temuri Yakobashvili) (born 1967) is a Georgian political scientist, diplomat and politician serving as State Minister for Reintegration since January 31, 2008.

Iakobashvili was born into a Georgian Jewish family in Tbilisi. He graduated from the Department of Physics at Tbilisi State University in 1984. He further attended Diplomatic Course at the universities of Oxford and Birmingham in the United Kingdom (1998), obtained the Yale University scholarship for the World Leaders’ Program (2002), and took international security coures at the John F. Kennedy School of Government in the United States (2003).^[1]

From 1990 to 2001, he worked for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Georgia where he last served as the Director of the U.S., Canada and Latin America Department. He holds the rank of Envoy Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary. Iakobashvili has been active in non-governmental sector, being a co-founder and member of the managing board of the Foreign Relations Council and the Atlantic Council of Georgia, a member of the board of the Georgian Institute of Public Affairs, and Executive Vice-President of the Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies. He has authored several publications on national security, conflict management and foreign relations, and was a visiting scholar to the Center for the Silk Road Studies at the Uppsala University, Sweden, in 2006.^[1]

On January 31, 2008, he was appointed by the President of Georgia Mikheil Saakashvili as State Minister for Reintegration, an office which had formerly been known as State Minister for Conflict Issues. He is thus a chief negotiator on the Abkhazia and South Ossetia conflicts.^[2] He is a proponent of a peaceful settlement of the secessionist conflicts and has called for "internationalization" of the currently Russian-dominated peacekeeping format.^[3]

Iakobashvili is married and has two children. Beyond Georgian and Hebrew, he is fluent in Russian and English.