At the end of August 2007 two new researchers, Merle Maigre and Indrek Elling, joined the ICDS team. For the
At the end of August 2007 two new researchers, Merle Maigre and Indrek Elling, joined the ICDS team.
For the last two years Merle Maigre has been Deputy Head of the NATO Liaison Office in Kiev, Ukraine, where she has been responsible for Euro-Atlantic Integration and Security Sector Reform. At the ICDS she will analyse defence and security policy developments in Ukraine. She will also continue to advise Ukrainian civic society on various NATO integration issues. Merle is additionally responsible for leading a project on civil-military relations in Estonia.
Indrek Elling joins the International Centre for Defence Studies to begin a project dealing with Estonia’s participation in international operations and peace-keeping missions. Indrek’s specific fields of research will also include Afghanistan and the South Caucasus, especially Georgia.
These new team members bring the number of the researchers in the ICDS, together with director Kadri Liik, to seven people and the number of research projects to five.
There are three ongoing research projects; “Security Sector Reform – a Nordic-Baltic Agenda”, led by Deputy Director Riina Kaljurand; senior researcher Tony Lawrence and junior researcher Kaarel Kaas are responsible for the Centre’s “Defence and Force Planning Project”; and senior researcher Juhan Kivirähk is responsible for sociological research at ICDS. His investigations focus on the attitudes of the Estonian population towards state defence issues and the transformation of those attitudes during the period that includes Estonia’s accession to NATO: from 2000 until the present.