Ongoing PhD Projects
Recent events in the Middle East, Ukraine, and North Korea show that the risk of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons is still high. While existing international security regimes related to these weapons are robust, they are in crisis. Violations and contestation of regimes create shocks and junctures that would either strengthen or weaken them. Compliance and enforcement are the normative practices to address such violations. The robustness of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons regimes correlates to the effectiveness of existing enforcement norms and procedures. Having all three regimes at a turning point makes analyzing the evolution of enforcement practices across the three regimes timely. The project involves a cross-regime analysis of enforcement norms and procedures to study the differences and offer an understanding of the implications for the regimes.
Samuel Forsythe's dissertation project examines the relationship and development of political conflict, information and communication technology (ICT) and strategic practice. It focuses on the development of theories, practices and discourses that instrumentalize knowledge, cognition and communication as political and military means. The motivation for the study is the question: How have new media and technologies enabled and transformed conflicts in the communicative and cognitive spheres?
The working hypothesis is that ICT promotes the intensification of types of conflict that stress stratagem, deception and manipulation as essential instruments for political actors and at the same time enable the dissemination of these instruments among non-state actors. Furthermore, the "hybrid" character of today's society - in which technology externalizes our cognitive and communicative processes - creates a situation in which attacks on information processing systems can constitute a form of violence.
Empirically, the research project includes an analysis of the new forms of strategic rationality developed through the discourse and practices of statesmanship, intelligence and information warfare, cyber and information security, and their interactions with the broader field of social communication and collective epistemic practice.
![[Translate to Englisch:]](/fileadmin/_processed_/2/2/csm_Sam_Forsythe_7b0fec050e.jpg "Sam Forsythe")
This project investigates why the prohibitions against chemical and biological weapons (CBW) remain comparatively robust despite weak verification and enforcement mechanisms. Building on the insight that CBW prohibitions function as moral norms, it combines perspectives from moral psychology and constructivist international relations to trace how individual norm internalization can scale up to collective adherence and regime resilience. By situating the study within the broader CBWNet research agenda on strengthening and safeguarding CBW norms, the project explores the conditions under which these prohibitions withstand contestation and how they might be reinforced. The aim is to generate practice-relevant strategies for demonstrating, explaining, and bolstering the resilience of CBW norms in the face of political, technological, and security challenges.
This dissertation explores why and under what condition a nuclear power in an extended deterrence relationship initiates strategic nuclear arms control negotiations, using the United States as the central case study. While existing scholarship largely concentrates on the conditions for successful treaty outcomes, this study focuses on the often-overlooked question of why negotiations begin in the first place – particularly when a nuclear power seeks to maintain credibility of its extended deterrence commitment within an alliance structure.
Drawing on a neoclassical realist theoretical framework that combines international system and domestic politics approaches, this project hypothesizes that an extended deterrence guarantor is likely to pursue nuclear arms control when it perceives vulnerability to its homeland that cannot be mitigated through a buildup of military capabilities, due to constraints imposed by domestic politics. Using process-tracing and drawing on declassified archival materials and elite interviews, the study seeks to identify the interplay between international strategic pressures and domestic political factors as central to understanding strategic nuclear arms control initiation.
By examining the United States – the only nuclear power with a sustained history of nuclear arms control conducted within an extended deterrence framework – this research contributes to a broader theory of nuclear arms control initiation relevant to contemporary nuclear policy debates.
This dissertation speaks to the recent scholarship in political science which has once again become interested in “bridging the gap” between academics and practitioners, discussing the opportunities and challenges of science-policy knowledge transfer in addressing pressing issues. In the field of arms control and disarmament, there are many such pressing issues in need of solutions: Transnational shifts and changes continue to challenge the arms control pillars of the Cold War, many of which have already eroded. At the same time, emerging technologies and advancements will have an impact on the future of arms control even if there is a great deal of uncertainty on how exactly. As a result of these complexities, policymakers require technical and field-specific knowledge, while scientists’ work is influenced by political processes and dynamics. However, little contemporary, comparative research exists about science-policy interactions in arms control which take place in various formal and informal settings. Linking theory-building on “epistemic communities” to interdisciplinary research on knowledge transfer and exchange, this dissertation seeks to conceptualise and understand the agency of social and natural scientists in arms control policy processes in Germany. Specifically, it investigates the interplay of values, activism and scientific evidence in science-policy interactions. Empirically focusing on the German arms control community, I use a mixed-methods approach, by combining quantitative data (survey) and qualitative research (in-depth case studies, interviews, participant observations).
Future nuclear disarmament treaties will likely include the verification of complete and correct declarations of items related to nuclear weapons programs. Nuclear archaeology is a field of research aiming at reconstructing the operational history of facilities producing fissile material which is an integral component of nuclear weapons. The methods of nuclear archaeology can provide estimates for past fissile material production making them a useful asset for assessing the completeness of fissile material declarations.
This research project, located within the Research Group Science for Nuclear Diplomacy of the Cluster for Natural and Technical Science Arms Control Research (CNTR), intends to advance existing techniques by including novel data sources as well as sophisticated statistical data analysis tools. It is planned to improve forensic measurement analysis, which is an important tool in nuclear archaeology, by systematically focusing on the most important information as well as complementing the measurements with data from archives documenting the historical operation of nuclear reactors. A particular focus of the project lays on implementing machine learning techniques, including recently established methods in the field of deep learning, for proper analysis of large data sets and reliable statistical statements. Finally, the integration of statistical results in a political verification regime is addressed.
Drawing on legal discourse theory, Antonio Arcudi’s dissertation addresses the question of how contestation over international norms – their discursive challenges and controversies – in turn affects these disputed norms.
The responsibility to protect and the ICC between evolution and erosion
The dissertation “The Normative Force of Conflict: Norm Specification Through Processes of Norm Contestation” connects to existing research on international norms that, though comprehensive in its analysis of norm contestation, still lacks consensus on the issue of whether contestation has a strengthening or a weakening effect on the norms in question. Using the example of two contested international norms – the international Responsibility to Protect and the duty to prosecute grave human rights abuses and violations of international humanitarian law –, this project analyzes the extent to which norm contestation leads to the specification of that particular norm.
The qualitative and quantitative proliferation of EU sanctions over the past years is puzzling not only given repeated indication of their limited effectiveness, but also in view of diverging national interests among EU member states. The project opens the “black box” of EU sanctions by analyzing contestation practices in the EU discourse on sanction implementation in the European Parliament as the EU’s major public forum. Apart from the economic and behavioral goals conventionally pursued with sanctions, it is argued that sanction effectiveness for the senders may also derive from their underlying signaling power as normative and order-constructing foreign policy tools. To examine EU sanctions against Russia, the project advances a constructivist-interpretive perspective and triangulates a discourse-analytically informed content analysis with expert interviews. In view of the current state of leeway-granting legal sanction frameworks, the project contributes by unravelling the involved EU actors’ conceptions of sanctions by means of the practice of implementation, thus broadening our understanding of the overall utility function of sanctions.
The European Commission recognized disinformation as a major challenge in 2018, highlighting its detrimental impact on trust in institutions and media, and its ability to hinder well-informed decision-making in democracies. Additionally, foreign interference and the COVID-19 pandemic have amplified the geopolitical threat of disinformation. Social media technologies have facilitated the spread of false information, which has proven difficult and costly for states and international organizations like the EU to counteract. Although disinformation exploits societal divisions, leading to polarization and undermining security, it remains unclear what effect it truly has on institutions such as the EU as assessing the impact has been proven difficult. This PhD project aims to address this research gap by analyzing the extent to which disinformation affects the EU by assessing origins, impacts, and methods to combat disinformation at various levels within the EU. Using a mixed-method approach, the thesis will evaluate the micro- (individuals), meso- (media landscape), and macro-level (public discourse) effects of disinformation from 2019 to 2024, including its impact on elections and the pandemic prevention. This PhD project is part of the LOEWE Research Group World Orders in Conflict.
Terroristic threat has been a present phenomenon in European countries throughout the last decades. Nevertheless, its impact on the public opinion, policymaking and the national discussions has never been as strong as currently observed. At the same time, the European project is put to test. Right-wing populist parties are uprising and the future of nationalism, immigration, and the European Union are controversially discussed between the European countries as well as within the countries themselves.
This study aims to provide answers to the influence of terroristic threat on identity discourse in France and Germany. Damaris Braun will analyze to what extent terror attacks reinforce national identity markers. An additional research objective is to clarify in which manner the terroristic threat changes the setting we live in and therefore influences our situated identities. Drawing upon a social identity approach, she assumes an interdependence and/or interference between national and European identity constructions. Aspects as agency, reconstruction of a positive identity and superordinate identity categories are additionally considered.
In the mixed methods design Damaris Braun contributes to research on identity by providing data showing how terroristic threat influences identity processes on a national and supranational level.
This PhD project investigates the rise of antifeminist conspiratorial mobilization in Germany, fueled by conservative, Catholic, and right-wing actors who oppose gender equality as well as queer and trans rights, because they view them as causing societal collapse due to the erosion of “natural” gender roles. Support of anti-feminism is not easily understood from a psychological needs perspective, as it entails an opposition to politics which promise emancipation for many. The particular form of conspiracist opposition to these politics furthermore connects them to antisemitic notions and supports a perceived urgency to defend oneself against the supposedly feminist elites. This PhD project aims to explore how individuals of different gender identities nevertheless experience political empowerment within these movements and how they view those they perceive as threatening. Employing a mixed-method approach, including interviews and online narrative analysis, the project aims to explore the socio-psychological mechanisms by which individuals gain political agency.
Lotta Rahlf’s doctoral project systematically compares how evaluations of efforts to prevent and counter violent extremism (P/CVE) are structurally organised across Europe. By mapping various ‘P/CVE evaluation systems’ and examining factors that may explain their differences, her dissertation draws attention to the variety of ways countries organise the generation of evaluative knowledge to respond to increasing demands for evidence-based P/CVE measures. Filling crucial theoretical and empirical gaps in P/CVE research, Rahlf particularly examines the levers that make P/CVE evaluation systems more centralised in some countries and more decentralised in others. This means that her dissertation explores why P/CVE evaluations are strongly controlled by the government in some contexts while such activities are more distributed among several entities, including civil society, in others. After a comparative mapping of evaluation management in the P/CVE field in Europe, she will use qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to analyse which factors have an influence on certain designs of such evaluation systems. Based on the results, Rahlf will then select three countries to analyse their respective evaluation systems in depth. This dissertation, which is part of the EU-funded Marie Skłodowska-Curie PhD network VORTEX, also has a high practical relevance as it enables P/CVE practitioners and policy makers to learn from other European contexts.
So-called Reichsbürger (‘citizens of the Reich [German empire]’) are not a new phenomenon in Germany. However, recent events, such as the investigation into ‘Patriotische Union’ (‘Patriotic Union’) since December 2022, the Covid-19 protest movements, and several serious acts of violence have been highlighting their increasing societal relevance. And yet, the currently existing body of knowledge is highly fragmented which hinders an in-depth analysis of this particular ideological spectrum and its followers. Interestingly, preliminary analyses suggest potentially substantial differences between the Reichsbürger following and the followers of other, better-studied extremist phenomena. This relates to, for example, demographic factors, social dynamics, and forms of organization. As a result, existing conceptualizations of radicalization cannot easily be transferred to Reichsbürger, which necessitates new and dedicated research into the topic.
In his dissertation, Maximilian Ruf investigates individual pathways and causalities of radicalization of Reichsbürger in Germany based on biographical-narrative interviews. The overarching aim of the project is to generate and systematize new knowledge on Reichsbürger radicalization and to delineate it from other radicalization phenomena in order to identify new starting points for further research and practical development.
Dealing with postmigrant diversity is a current challenge for state institutions in Germany. Demographic change as well as debates on racism lead to pressure to deal with questions of belonging, representation and participation of people with migration background. In Germany, an effort by police to address and employ people with migration background in recruitment campaigns can be observed. However, this diversification does not necessarily lead to institutional change due to the established cop culture and organizational culture.
Even if there is no paradigm shift yet, a change in the way the German police is dealing with postmigrant diversity can be observed. This dissertation project uses ethnomethodological methods and qualitative interviews to investigate understandings of diversity within the German police by analyzing practices of creating diversity.
Radical positions are currently on the rise again in many European countries as well as in Germany, and anti-democratic and anti-emancipatory ideas are spreading. Hate crime is on the rise, especially online, and comments and statements in the virtual world are becoming more uninhibited. This development has become particularly evident for several years in the phenomena of Salafist jihadism and right-wing extremism.
By winning over more people to right-wing or Salafist ideology and increasing the willingness to use violence within the scenes, the mobilization strategies and techniques of extremist actors seem to be paying off. By means of a qualitative content analysis of Facebook content of Salafist and right-wing extremist actors, Manjana Sold investigates in her dissertation project which mobilization techniques are used by differently radical individuals and which differences can be observed within the phenomenon areas.
Dealing with the threat of terrorism has shaped national security agendas since 9/11. German politics, too, reacted to what was perceived as a “new dimension” of threat. The German approach, however, relies on legal measures and the rule of law, defining terrorism as a form of crime which has to be dealt with in legal terms (in contrast to the US “war on terror”-approach). Consequently, numerous laws concerning counterterrorsim have been passed on the federal and state level since 2001. They cover a variety of legal areas, reflect a broad concept of security and have repeatedly transformed the framework of national security. Some mechanisms of the rule of law have been challenged or overwhelmed by these transformations: Risk-management and preventive measures intended to enable security agencies to act as far ahead of the situation as possible also invade areas protected by the Grundrecht (fundamental rights) and dilute basic principles such as the presumption of innocence.
In her dissertation project, Isabelle Stephanblome examines the legislative reactions to terrorism in Germany within the field of tension between politics, law and insecurity. To this end, different strategies for controlling insecurity are typologised and arguments for their legitimacy are analysed. The empirical basis for this is the legislation of the federal government and selected Bundesländer (states). The legal texts as well as the documents of their drafting processes will be examined with an interpretative approach in a qualitative case study. The project is located in political science legal research and aims to contribute to opening up law for security studies as a state instrument for processing uncertainty.
The dissertation examines how prevention hybrids influence practice. Prevention of extremism is usually divided into three areas. In theory, a distinction is made between primary, secondary and tertiary prevention. While primary prevention is aimed at the general public, secondary prevention attempts to reach people who are assumed to be at an increased risk of radicalization. Finally, tertiary prevention is aimed at distancing and deradicalization. In practice, however, overlaps can be found between the areas, resulting in a mixture of objectives and approaches. For example, primary prevention programs are implemented in the context of secondary prevention and vice versa. These prevention hybrids thus combine aspects that by definition are ascribed to different areas. The project examines how practitioners experience and implement these programs in different contexts. The dissertation thus explores how opportunities and needs are negotiated in prevention practice. This research project, which is part of the EU-funded Marie Skłodowska-Curie doctoral network VORTEX, provides insights into the conception and implementation of prevention and thus has theoretical and practical relevance.
During the last decade terrorist attacks by so-called lone wolf terrorist have occurred. The attacks by Anders Breivik in Norway and Arid Uka in Germany are just two examples of this growing phenomenon. Those perpetrators act alone and allegedly radicalize alone. Yet, radicalization research highlights the importance of social ties in radicalization and mobilization to terrorism. Therefore, one has to pose the question, how lone wolves radicalize, if social ties are highly relevant in radicalization, yet the main feature of lone wolves is supposedly their loneliness. To date little research has been conducted to address this puzzle systematically on a theoretical or empirical basis.
In her dissertation project, Annika von Berg addresses the question how social ties affect radicalization processes of lone actors. To answer this question, an identity-theory-based model will be used to examine these radicalization processes in single-case-studies via process-tracing. The case studies will investigate incidents in the field of right-wing extremism and Islamism extremism.
In the past twenty years, the African Union (AU) and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) have demonstrated considerable agency in providing peace and security on the continent thus shaping political orders and life worlds. The literature on intervention pictures those African interventions as less or even non-coercive, hence attest them being more legitimate compared to more contested ‘Western’ interventions.
This PhD project challenges this assumption by arguing that interventions are inherently coercive as they react to a normative crisis in an attempt of order-making. Preliminary field work suggests that coercion is much more ambiguous than its usual negative connotation and that perceptions of coercion do fall apart along parameters of space, positionality and time. In this, there is a flipping point between legitimate and illegitimate coercion that, in effect, shapes the legitimacy of the intervention and the attempt of regional order-making. Based on these assumptions, this PhD project asks: how coercive are African interventions? What constitutes coercion for whom? Why do perceptions fall apart and how does this impact regional order-making?
Drawing on ethnographic elements, such as observation, immersion, (non-)elite interview and focus group research in The Gambia and Guinea-Bissau, this PhD project (1) explores perceptions of coercion within those two case studies as a way to demonstrate how those affected by interventions perceive the interventions’ coercive nature and what constitutes coercion for them. In a most similar case design, this project (2) identifies causal factors why those perceptions fall apart and (3) how this shapes the attempt and legitimacy of regional order-making.
This research studies institutional forms and conceptual imaginaries employed by the Turkish government on the one hand and residents of Turkish origin on the other, connected to their political activities in Germany. During the AKP era, a general re-orientation of Turkish foreign policy could be observed, which also impacted the outreach towards Turks residing abroad and their descendants. This engagement of Turkey has manifested itself in various aspects from granting her citizens abroad external voting rights to a policy that encouraged institutionalization. At the same time, the AKP started to use the term “diaspora”, a denominator that stresses identity bonds to a community outside of the place of actual residence. In the vein of this new “diaspora political” engagement, certain political activities could be observed amongst Turkish people in Germany. Inter alia, pro-AKP/Erdoğan organizations entered the political stage.The project examines strategic positioning and political activities of selected migrant organizations in Germany, which are confronted on the one hand with integration expectations in German society, and on the other hand with a determined transnationalization and diaspora policy of the Turkish AKP government.
Climate and environmental changes are massively transforming agricultural spaces in many parts of the world: soil is losing organic matter due to warming between droughts and floods, insects and especially plant pests are multiplying more. In addition, there is erosion and destruction due to direct interventions in nature, such as extractive raw material extraction or monocultures. These changes are understood and perceived differently by the people affected. Perceptions of nature, land and climate are shaped by different local cultural traditions, but are increasingly intertwined with debates and environmental organizations of a global dimension. In addition, the large-scale projects of globally active extraction companies have a concrete impact on the ground.
The dissertation project investigates intersections of these multi-axial problems by examining exemplary conflicts over territories in Colombia. The project analyzes local responses to very concrete global environmental problems on the basis of the positions and context of environmental movements, peasant organizations and local political representatives.
The subject of this research project is the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, a law passed by the Canadian Parliament that came into effect in 2021. The Act stipulates that Canada’s legal system must be aligned with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), which was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2007. After initially rejecting the declaration, the Canadian government underwent a dramatic shift in position, first retroactively endorsing UNDRIP and subsequently incorporating it into national law. This process is of particular relevance since Canada is the first settler state and the second country overall, after Colombia, to integrate the declaration into its national legal and political frameworks.
A particular focus of the study is on how the UNDRIP localization process affects Indigenous women and girls. While their specific experiences and vulnerabilities have occasionally garnered attention (e.g., in the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls), they are often overlooked in both legislation and research. The project aims to contribute to understanding the interplay between gender, postcolonial constellations, and Indigenous self-determination in policymaking.
To this end, the national political process that led to the adoption of the UNDRIP Act in Canada is first reconstructed. Furthermore, relevant actors, their interests and the balance of power in the political negotiation process as well as the accompanying social discourse are analyzed. By subsequently examining the implementation processes up to the Canadian federal election in 2025, the arguments made in the discourse are compared in order to understand the interactions between political decisions, social reactions and the ongoing challenges in the implementation of the UNDRIP Act. The conceptual foundations of the project were developed from postcolonial and feminist theories.
This PhD project aims to comparatively analyze circumstances and consequences of interpretations of violence in post-colonial relationships, specifically in relation to the atrocities committed by the colonial government during the 1904-8 genocide in former German South West Africa (GSWA) and during the 1905-7 Majimaji War in former German East Africa (GEA). It asks how and why the post-independence interpretations of these histories differ (or else mirror each other) in Namibia and the Herero and Nama diasporas and in Tanzania, as well as what role their interpretations play in the starkly different international treatment of these histories. Additionally, it will ask whether and how narratives of historical events interrelate with different forms (or intensities) of civic and political engagement in relation to them. In this sense, this project would contribute to a greater understanding for the processes involved in the attribution of meaning to historical events and the consequences that these interpretations of violence can have for collective agency in local and in transnational arenas. Furthermore, this project promises to contribute to a growing public discourse on how to cope with the vast array of atrocities committed during colonialism in post-colonial relationships today.
The vision of the African Union (AU) – “An integrated, prosperous and peaceful Africa, driven by its own citizens [...]” – and the mission statement of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) – “From an ECOWAS of States to an ECOWAS of Peoples” – suggest inclusive development processes and goals of the two organizations. This is interpreted as an intention to align their policies with the norm of “people-centric governance.” As central actors in the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA), both organizations can intervene for purposes of crisis prevention, conflict management, and post-conflict reconstruction and development. Scholarly engagements with military components of African conflict interventions have dominated the generation of knowledge about African intervention politics to date. Besides, through the “local turn”, a strand of research has emerged that critically examines liberal peacebuilding and foregrounds the actions of local peacebuilding. The dissertation project addresses the intertwining of the local and the international in African non-military interventions by elaborating how and why civil society actors are included or excluded as collaborators in AU and ECOWAS conflict interventions. Using practice-theoretical approaches, the study reconstructs the practices of inclusion and exclusion of civil society actors on the basis of the two case studies Mali and Guinea and contributes to further opening the “black box” of African non-military intervention politics.
This will first be realized through guideline-based interviews with relevant AU and ECOWAS actors through field research visits to Addis Ababa and Abuja, and illustrated through the case studies. In the latter, guided interviews with civilian non-state actors and participatory approaches with focus groups will be conducted. In addition to experiential knowledge on inclusion and exclusion mechanisms in AU and ECOWAS interventions, information to reconstruct the actor landscape will be obtained through social network analyses and “communities of practice”, which form the conceptual framework of the project, will be identified in the field of African regional conflict interventions.
The Federal Republic of Germany is characterized by multiple crises and increasing social polarization. In this context, Saxony represents an (alleged) aberrant path of authoritarian transformation of society, and “Saxon democracy” was already seen in 2012 as a synonym for the creeping decay of democratic values and structures, illiberal responses to social crises, and the strengthening of the extreme right. At the same time, the “Alternative for Germany” (AfD) is challenging the democratic system, especially in Saxony, with its continued successes in state and federal elections. It bundles the electorate for authoritarian policies and regressive crisis management: The renationalization of politics, racist migration and integration policies, stereotypical gender images, and an advocacy of fossil fuel energy and economic policies are central components of the AfD’s program. Similarly, the ongoing protests around coronavirus protection measures show that the populist potentials for the AfD’s anti-system policies are far from exhausted.
This dissertation project investigates the potentials of regressive political subjectification in the everyday life of residents of a large city and a medium-sized city in Saxony. Regarding the causes of the AfD’s rise to success as well as broader transformations of everyday life, the project uses a multi-methodological and spatially sensitive approach to investigate how residents perceive the changes in their environment and what potentials exist for democratic intervention.
