This year’s ISET’s Summer School was composed of a series of lectures, talks by prominent speakers, and debates on the subject of reforms.

Over the past 30 years, Georgia went through a remarkable roller-coaster transition from being one of the best performing USSR republics to a failed state to the top reformer on the post-Soviet space and thus demonstrating that change is possible. Georgia’s experience of fast-track development and modernization through international cooperation, radical deregulation, and trade liberalization carry important lessons learned for policymakers in other transition and developing nations.

In 2007, an American businessman and friend of the then Prime Minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, was visiting Damascus before continuing his journey to Jerusalem. On the morning of his departure to Israel, the Mukhabarat, Syria’s secret service, knocked at his hotel room. The Syrian agents calmed down the scared businessman – he was not to be taken to some torture prison, of which there were many in Syria.

We are excited to announce that this week ISET will be hosting a second delegation representing the Norwegian School of Economics in Bergen. A four-day program is planned to start on April 3, which includes anti-corruption seminars, public discussions, and site visits to relevant public institutions and businesses.

Giga Bokeria, the leader of the European Georgia opposition party, visited ISET to deliver a lecture on anti-corruption reforms in Georgia carried out by the United National Movement government of 2003-2012. Bokeria, a UNM member until 2017, played an integral role in the Rose Revolution, which ousted the late Eduard Shevardnadze, under whose tenure Georgia had become wracked by institutional corruption.