Le Pavic, Gaëlle

Gaëlle is an Associate Research Fellow at UNU-CRIS; she conducts research in three directions 1) the intersection of social services and geopolitics 2) the social consequences of borders and border contestations 3) knowledge production and ethics in research. Gaëlle was awarded two post-doctoral fellowships at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography (IfL), Leipzig, Germany and at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland where she worked respectively on the social production of space in the Georgian-Abkhazian context and displaced Ukrainian mothers to Switzerland. Gaëlle has consulted for the United Nations (Office of the UN Resident Coordinator) in Georgia and is also an active member of the Center for the Social Study of Migration and Refugees (CESSMIR) at Ghent University.

Previously, she was a PhD Fellow at UNU-CRIS focusing on access to social welfare and social services in situations of regional separatism. Her research investigates civil society organizations’ role in facilitating this access within and across de facto borders. The two  case studies she looks at were Abkhazia and Transnistria, two de facto states that parted respectively from Georgia and Moldova in the 1990s.To pursue this research, Gaëlle worked under the supervision of Professor  Ine Lietaert, Professor  Fabienne Bossuyt and Dr Giacomo Orsini, all affiliated with Ghent University (Department of Social Work and Social Pedagogy and Department of Political Sciences). This doctoral research was funded by the Special Research Fund of Ghent University (BOF).

Prior to this, Gaëlle worked as a researcher at the Department of Social Work and Social Pedagogy at Ghent University. She was involved in two research projects, Horizon 2020: RefugeeWellSchool, which aimed to improve the well-being of refugees at schools, and InHere, which stands for INclusive Holistic care for REfugees and migrants victims of sexual violence in Belgium, Ireland, and the United Kingdom.

Over the past years, Gaëlle was a project manager at the Development Office of the College of Europe (Bruges) and before the French Embassy to Croatia. She designed and implemented numerous training programmes on EU matters and worked with civil society organizations in Croatia and Russia on projects mainly dealing with ethnic minorities, migrants and refugees as well as memories and narratives in post-conflict societies. She was also  an intern at the European Delegations to Ukraine and later Moldova and at the French Embassy to Russia. 

She was awarded a full scholarship to study at the College of Europe where she conducted a research project focused on the European Union’s soft power toward its Eastern neighbourhood with Ukraine - as a case study. She also received a grant from the French Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA) during a nine-months training programme (Prep’ ENA).