{"id":27769,"date":"2026-06-12T15:09:57","date_gmt":"2026-06-12T13:09:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/eurossig.eu\/eurossig\/?page_id=27769"},"modified":"2026-09-02T14:48:14","modified_gmt":"2026-09-02T12:48:14","slug":"amina-ziyatdinova","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/eurossig.eu\/eurossig\/2026-edition\/fellows-2026\/amina-ziyatdinova\/","title":{"rendered":"Amina Ziyatdinova"},"content":{"rendered":"

University of Siena, Netherlands<\/em><\/p>\n

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I am currently pursuing a Master\u2019s in Public and Cultural Diplomacy at the University of Siena, and I am expected to complete my degree in 2026. I hold a Bachelor\u2019s in Cultural and Literary Studies from Adam Mickiewicz University in Pozna\u0144. As part of my studies, I completed Erasmus+ exchange semesters at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and at the University of Graz in Austria. My academic focus has been on cultural diplomacy, governance, and international cooperation.<\/p>\n

Fellow Report: 20th European Summer School on Internet Governance<\/h4>\n

I still remember opening the acceptance email at my desk at UNCTAD in Geneva, elbow-deep in a coffee value chain report, and finding out I\u2019d been selected as a fellow for the 20th EuroSSIG Summer School on Internet Governance. Coming from Kazakhstan, where \u201cinternet governance\u201d as a field barely exists outside of a handful of conference panels, it felt like a door opening onto a room I hadn\u2019t fully realized was there.<\/p>\n

Meissen turned out to be the perfect place for it: a small, cobblestone town on the Elbe, known for its porcelain and quiet enough that a week of intense seminars never felt overwhelming. This wasn\u2019t just any edition. It was the 20th anniversary, and the organizers had every right to be proud: the school had recently been honored with a WSIS 2026 Prize nomination in the Capacity Building category, awarded at a ceremony in Geneva.<\/p>\n

The highlight of the week was Practicum on IGF Strategy, which took place almost every evening. We started by identifying stakeholders and developing a common vision, then formulated a mission statement, grounded our approach in a common set of values, and finally settled on strategic pillars, goals, and results; each stage was presented, challenged, and consolidated as a group before we were allowed to move on. By the closing session, we\u2019ve prepared something that really resembled a coherent strategic document, fully developed by fellows from completely different institutional worlds. It was probably the closest I\u2019ve come to developing real multilateral policy outside the UNCTAD building.<\/p>\n

The daytime programme moved from theory to the machinery behind it. Peter Koch of DENIC opened with how critical internet resources actually function and Adam Peake walked us through ICANN, before Philip Struyf of EURid explained how country-code domains are managed while Chris Disspain of Identity Digital and Keith Drzek of Verisign covered the generic ones. By the time we reached cybersecurity, DNS abuse, and incident handling with Tatiana Tropina of the Internet Society, I\u2019d stopped paying attention to abbreviations and started taking notes on the politics behind them: which government wanted which levers of control, and why. <\/p>\n

If I had to choose one session that has stayed with me the longest, it\u2019d the one from the anniversary celebration day, when the programme opened into parallel workshops for personal growth. I chose \u201cNegotiation as a personal skill: finding agreement when everyone has a stake,\u201d led negotiation expert Friedhelm Wachs, over the alternatives on public speaking and negotiation techniques. After a week spent building consensus inside the IGF Strategy practicum, I thought I\u2019d already reached my limits as a negotiator. Wachs went even further into what actually happens from a psychological point of view, when you hold a position against someone who won\u2019t move, and how to find agreement without pretending the stakes weren\u2019t real. For me, it reframed the whole week: everything from the domain management debates to our own practicum arguments had, underneath, been a negotiation. <\/p>\n

What I\u2019ll carry forward just as much as the content is the experience of being surrounded by such a diverse audience: fellows from governments, civil society, the private sector, and academia, several presenting their own research on AI and internet governance midweek, all of us ending the summer school in national costumes at the closing gala. I came into UNCTAD Trade, Gender and Development Programme already convinced that access to markets, information, and power is never just a technical question. EuroSSIG gave me a clearer vocabulary, a genuine network, and a strategy document with my name on it to demonstrate this to audiences that actually shape how the internet is governed. Twenty years later, this summer school clearly knows what it is doing. I am just happy that the 20th edition had room for a fellow from Kazakhstan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

University of Siena, Netherlands I am currently pursuing a Master\u2019s in Public and Cultural Diplomacy at the University of Siena, and I am expected to complete my degree in 2026. I hold a Bachelor\u2019s in Cultural and Literary Studies from Adam Mickiewicz University in Pozna\u0144. As part of my studies, I completed Erasmus+ exchange semesters … Continue reading “Amina Ziyatdinova”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":14760,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"eurossig26_fellows.php","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-27769","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eurossig.eu\/eurossig\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/27769","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eurossig.eu\/eurossig\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eurossig.eu\/eurossig\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eurossig.eu\/eurossig\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eurossig.eu\/eurossig\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27769"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/eurossig.eu\/eurossig\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/27769\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48756,"href":"https:\/\/eurossig.eu\/eurossig\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/27769\/revisions\/48756"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eurossig.eu\/eurossig\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/14760"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eurossig.eu\/eurossig\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}