Aytan Gahramanova

Aytan Gahramanova holds M.A. degrees in International Relations from the Institute of Public Administration and Political Science (Baku), Peace and Development studies from University Jaume I (Castellón, Spain), and Political Economy of the Countries in Transit from Central European University (Budapest, Hungary).  Aytan has 10 year experience of working for various international development organizations in Azerbaijan such as GIZ, USAID, Oxfam, where she managed multi-million programmes on technical assistance for Azerbaijan in the areas of economic reforms, public administration reforms, assistance to civil society organizations. She has several publications published in the academic journals on the topics of democratization and conflict management in Caucasus region. Currently she holds a position of the Early Stage Researcher at DCU School of Law and Governance as a Marie Curie Fellow. Her focus of PhD research is civil society actors in the Caspian Region - the dynamics of democratization and political cooptation.

The main purpose of the study is to explain the impact of oil revenues fluctuation onto relationship between the petro-state and civil society, and how that affect ability of the civil society to fulfill its function as a conductor of the alternative “good governance” discourse in the society.  In my study, I will focus on the selected think tanks and youth movements’ strategies in their attempts to promote alternative discourse on “good governance” during the times of early oil extraction (t-1), oil boom (t-2) and during decrease of oil revenue (t-3) in Azerbaijan covering the period of 1996-2018.