Kazakhstan's OSCE Chairmanship: Unfulfilled Promises

Anthony Pahigian is a deputy director in the State Department Office of European Security and Political Affairs where he is responsible for OSCE issues. He most recently returned from Belgrade, Serbia, where he served as the deputy head of the OSCE Mission to Serbia. 

Prior to that Pahigian served as public affairs officer in Vilnius, Lithuania, political officer in Brasilia, and Bratislava, science officer in Rome and consular officer in Bogota.  He also worked in the nonproliferation office in the State Department Bureau of Political Military Affairs. 

Vladimir Shkolnikov served in several capacities with the Warsaw-based office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE/ODIHR).  He first served as the head of the Migration Unit and then as the head of the ODIHR's Democratization Department. He was responsible for supervising a large portfolio of the ODIHR's programs of technical assistance to the civil society, think tanks, political parties and governmental institutions in the New Independent States of the former Soviet Union and former Yugoslavia and chaired a number of OSCE democracy and rule of law conferences.

He has also served as the deputy head of the ODIHR Election Observation Mission to the 1999 Kazakhstan presidential elections.  After leaving ODIHR, Shkolnikov worked for a year as the director of Freedom House Europe, based in Budapest.

Anthony Richter is the associate director of the Open Society Institute, and director of the OSI Central Eurasia Project and Middle East & North Africa Initiative.

Richter is chairman of the governing board of the Revenue Watch Institute and serves on the board of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the World Policy Journal, and other publications. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.  He received a BA, with high honors, from Wesleyan University and an MA in Slavic languages and literatures from Columbia University. He speaks Russian, French, and Persian.