Forschungsprojekte

HNC³ bündelt die China-Kompetenzen der öffentlichen Hochschulen sowie der außeruniversitären Forschungseinrichtungen in der Metropolregion Hamburg. Vor dem Hintergrund der gegenwärtigen Chancen und Herausforderungen der Zusammenarbeit mit China stellen die Befähigung der einzelnen Konsortialpartner, rechtssichere Instrumente der Zusammenarbeit zu implementieren, sowie die Etablierung geeigneter Austauschformate in Bezug auf China-Kompetenzen zwischen den Konsortialpartnern die Hauptziele dar.
BMBF, 2023-2026

Individual sanctions have become a go-to instrument with which Western powers confront challenges to international peace and security. Shaping the trend of individualizing accountability, the USA and the EU as the main bilateral global sanction senders target individuals and entities to hold them accountable for the instigation of armed conflict, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, or the violation of human rights. INSA seeks to systematically analyze and compare the listing decisions of the USA and the EU.
DSF, 2023-2025

Governments in autocratic and autocratizing contexts may use anti-fake news laws to discredit critical civil society actors as agents of “disinformation” and punish them. Through comparative and cross-learning insights derived from field studies, we seek to map civil society responses against the autocratic use of disinformation laws and strengthen policies for right to information and freedom of speech and expression.
NED, 2023-2024

In an age of proliferating disinformation, governments in South and Southeast Asia have come out with anti-fake news laws. However, the “weaponization" of such laws can lead governments to control online platforms and censor critics. Our project examines the patterns and processes of the weaponization of such laws against civic actors and countermeasures by the latter. We aim for academic and policy outcomes to improve disinformation regulation while safeguarding digital rights.
GIGA, 2023-2024

Legal identity is a target of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)s and it underpins the SDGs at large. Not having a recognized legal identity can severely implicate people’s human rights and it may cause statelessness. Our project goes to the core of unresolved tensions around theorising sovereign statehood and the authority to make law.
Swedish Research Council, 2022-2023

The goal of this project is to assess the short- and mid-term economic consequences of EU and US sanctions imposed on Russia on companies from sanctions sender countries. Knowing how and why economic sanctions affect firms’ behavior is key to understanding the impact that sanctions will have - both for good and for ill – for senders’ countries’ economies and sanctions’ effectiveness.

Technological advances and digitalisation are rapidly transforming the world of work, and the emergence of online labour platforms is one manifestation of this. The resulting labour market outcomes and dynamics are not well understood, particularly in the Global South. This project consists of a series of four studies that contribute to understanding the characteristics and dynamics of online work in India and selected African countries.
GIZ, 2022-2023

Transfer for Transformation (T4T) is an application lab. Its topical focus are political and economic transformations (also in the digital arena) in the Global South. T4T will innovate in the practice of knowledge transfer through consequent target-group-integration and novel access strategies. It will also advance the scholarship on the subject by analysing the effectiveness and impact of different types of knowledge transfer.
Leibniz Association, 2022-2025

By means of a comparative historical analysis of Iranian, Saudi-Arabian, and Turkish engagement in Africa following the continent’s decolonization processes and running up until 2020, this project seeks to make sense of middle-power engagement in external regions. First, the project will identify the periods of shifting IST engagement in Africa. Second, it will analyze the reasons why, and the conditions under which, IST have stepped up—or reduced—their foreign policy efforts in Africa. Third, it will develop mid-range generalizations on middle-power engagement in external regions.
DFG, 2022-2025

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, political leaders reacted by containment measures that, next to combating the spread of the pandemic, also presented a window of opportunity to bolster executives’ personal grasp on power. Personalization of power has been particularly worrying in the Global South where constraints on the chief executives were often already weak prior to the pandemic. This project assesses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the personalization of executive power in 36 countries of the Global South.
DFG, 2021-2024

A policy-oriented research project bringing together the GIGA and the East Asia Institute in Seoul. The project aims at analysing German/EU and Korean strategies for Indo-Pacific engagement and identifying areas for in-depth consultation, coordination and cooperation.
Korea Foundation, 2022

The second phase of the research project “Large-Scale Land Acquisitions, Rural Change, and Social Conflict” focuses on the socio-economic impact of large-scale land acquisitions (LSLA) on local populations, particularly in terms of communal land rights and indigenous groups. Furthermore, it investigates the relationship between LSLA and global (agricultural) supply chains. The project aims to synthesise existing research and generate new evidence at the intersection of rural development and sustainable production and consumption.
BMZ, 2022

In March 2020, the UN Secretary-General called for the easing of sanctions against Iran in response to COVID-19. Hence, external shocks are potentially related to sanctions termination. Yet, the effect of different types of external shocks such as pandemics, natural disasters, and economic crises on the (gradual) removal of sanctions has not been systematically studied. This project examines when and how external shocks affect sanctions termination through a nested research design combining new data collection, statistical analyses, and two case studies.
DFG, 2022-2023

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has led to novel experiences of isolation, mobility restriction and exclusion. Mobile populations are particularly affected when borders are closed and migrants are turned away, commuters are denied border crossings, resettlements are suspended or unlawful deportations are justified by pandemic-related risks. This network brings together twenty migration researchers to collect data, build theory, and gain new knowledge about the impact of the pandemic on the Global South.
DFG, 2021-2024

This project analyzes the socio-economic fall-out of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the intervening role of social protections, on families with children in eight Latin American countries. The region, with high levels of inequality, labor informality, and urbanization, has been particularly hard hit by both pandemic deaths and economic effects. The social protection responses, however, have varied dramatically, from a massive emergency assistance plan in Brazil to virtually no additional cash transfer aid in Mexico.
DFG, 2021-2022

Indonesia is fighting one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in Asia. On January 13, 2021, the country started one of the world’s biggest COVID-19 vaccination drives. The plan is to inoculate 181.5 million people – two third of the population – in 15 months using primarily the CoronaVac from China’s Sinovac Biotech. The vaccination campaign is ambitious and its success hinges on a number of supply and demand side factors which are subject to investigation in this project.
DFG, 2021-2022

The COVID-19 pandemic reaches the Central African Republic (CAR) just when citizens were passing milestones for ending the country's conflicts through a peace agreement and national elections. A new rebellion broke out in late 2020 that hindered medical access to some of the most impoverished areas. An interplay of rebellion, elections and containing the pandemic have become the critical triangle deciding whether CAR can overcome its deep-seated patterns of governance that are stifling political and economic progress.
DFG, 2021-2022

The joint project WIKOOP-INFRA will draw up empirically grounded guidelines that offer researchers from Germany and the EU support and guidance for scientific cooperation with their Chinese colleagues at large research infrastructures under existing framework conditions.
BMBF, 2021-2024

The Asia-Pacific research area (APRA) comprises about half of the world's population and some of its most dynamic economies. The importance of the region as producer of knowledge is reflected in its growing number of international publications and patents, as well as development of new (digital) business models. By analysing the performance of science, technology, and innovation in the APRA, the project aims at supplying an empirical-evidence base for the strategic further development of cooperation with countries in Asia-Pacific.
BMBF, 2021-2024