Completed Doctorates at PRIF
Four doctoral students defended their dissertations in 2023
Promoting early career researchers is one of the institute’s central tasks. This year, four of our doctoral students successfully defended their dissertations. We congratulate this year's doctoral graduates Hande Abay Gaspar, Ben Christian, Anton Peez and Clara-Auguste Süß.
In her dissertation, Hande Abay Gaspar investigated which social and political opportunity structures can promote or slow down violent radicalization and which mechanisms are triggered in the process. To this end, she used a comparative causal process analysis to reconstruct the radicalization process of a violent and a non-violent Salafist group in Germany and thus identified conditional factors that can promote or inhibit violence. Hande Abay Gaspar is now co-head of the research group “Radicalization” at PRIF. She is also co-project leader of the project “PrEval – Zukunftswerkstätten”.
Ben Christian’s dissertation is the first to examine the question of how international organizations (IOs) deal with criticism from their own employees. He argues that the internal “culture of criticism” is a crucial (and so far largely overlooked) variable that can explain why many IOs do not learn from their mistakes. Although most IOs have built up a professional “learning infrastructure” in recent years, the repressive handling of internal dissent prevents these formal structures from realizing their full potential. At the same time, the work shows that this specific attitude towards “criticism from within” is not only dysfunctional. The repressive culture of criticism also ensures organizational stability and enables international organizations to remain capable of acting in an extremely contradictory environment. The work explains this “criticism dilemma” theoretically and shows empirically how IOs deal with it. Ben Christian is now a research associate at Goethe University Frankfurt.
In her doctoral project, Clara-Auguste Süß investigated the connection between violent Islamist radicalization, marginalization and democratization in post-revolutionary Tunisia and highlighted the ambivalence of democratization processes. Based on theoretical causal mechanisms, a comprehensive frame analysis of the online output of jihadist actors and an investigation of the perspectives of (potential) supporters of these actors based on field research, she argues for the need to include marginalization in research on radicalization dynamics. Clara-Auguste Süß has been working as a research associate at Goethe University Frankfurt since September 2023.
Anton Peez’ dissertation examined whether economic sanctions intended to improve democracy and human rights in the targeted country in fact do so. He revisited this key question in IR research with new data, empirical methods, and in a more recent timeframe than past work has, finding that sanctions likely still have negative effects on average, despite significant 21st century policy innovations such as ‘targeted sanctions.’ Beyond these substantive findings, Anton Peez’ dissertation also contributes to ongoing discussions surrounding replication and systematic review in the social science. Anton Peez has been working as a postdoctoral researcher at Goethe University Frankfurt since this year.
