Shorena Nikoleishvili is a project researcher at the University of Turku, Faculty of Law. Her dissertation defense is scheduled on spring 2024. Her main research interests relate to the theory and practice of the international law, human rights, migration, and internal displacement more specifically the ethnical minorities’ right to self-determination, historical development of human rights, and systemic effect of human rights on state formation. Ms. Nikoleishvili’s dissertation examines contested statehood in international law. In her research she employs normative aspects of the customary definition of statehood as a viewpoint from where she looks into the problems that the normative concept of statehood poses to regions mired in perpetually contested statehood.  Ms. Nikoleishvili has held long term research visits at the Vrije University of Brussels and University of Luxemburg. She also was working as an International Fellow at the Vrije University Amsterdam. Ms. Nikoleishvili has published her research in Europe and the United States.  She has presented her research widely for example at the IGLP workshop organized by the Harvard Law School and the Hague Academy of International Law. 

Outside of academia Ms. Nikoleishvili has worked for the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre for monitoring internal displacement in eight countries in Central Asia and Caucasus. She contributed 124 displacement reports for the Global Report on Internal Displacement 2023. Ms. Nikoleishvili is also member of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimes - Stakeholder Engagement Dialogues as a representative of academia. 

Before she joined academia, Ms. Nikoleishvili worked in the Ministry of Justice of Georgia, at the European Parliament and in OSCE/ODIHR election missions.