Ambassador Tedo Japaridze is a former member of the Georgian Parliament and Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee (2012-2016) and served as Foreign Policy Adviser to the Prime Minister of Georgia. Ambassador Japaridze also served as Vice-Chairman for International Relations at the Anaklia Development Consortium, Tbilisi.
His career as a public servant working in various Georgian Governmental agencies has spanned nearly three decades; starting with the position of First Deputy Chair of the UNESCO Affairs Council of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Georgia in 1989. He then served as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Georgia to the USA, Canada and Mexico between 1994 and 2002 before becoming Georgia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs between 2003 and 2004. He was a member of the Georgian Dream party from 2012 to 2016.
Ambassador Japaridze was the Woodrow Wilson Public Policy Scholar in Washington between 2006 and 2007 and has since held various posts, among others as the President of the Energy Security Centre in Baku, Azerbaijan and the Secretary General to the Black Sea Economic Cooperation organisation in Istanbul, Turkey. He regularly contributes articles to journals, the most recent ones including Tbilisi’s Relevance to Washington: What Is, Where Is, and What can be; Gas Security in the Transitional European Market and Independence, Democracy and the Russian Taboo.
