"Spotlight on…" New Research Fellow Thies Niemeier

What sparked your interest in working at the GIGA in this position?

I was attracted to this position by both the specific project and the GIGA as an institution. The project is highly innovative, generating new data on a previously understudied topic, and I am excited about helping to bring it to publication. Simultaneously, I recognized that the GIGA would be a perfect environment for my development as a researcher, given its unique blend of specialized regional expertise and deep knowledge of broader political and economic science areas. The opportunities for valuable feedback and collaborative projects available here are extremely appealing.

What would you like the impact of your research to be?

Our goal in this project is simple, yet profound: we want to develop a database that lists sanctioned individuals and other entities. We hope this resource will allow us to increase the transparency of listing decisions and find out what guides these decisions. Ultimately, we hope our research can help policymakers in their choices and enables them to design better, more targeted measures that can prevent democratic backsliding, military aggression, and humanitarian disasters.

What is the focus of your research and what are you most looking forward to in this position at the GIGA?

My work focuses on economic sanctions, more specifically on bringing security considerations back into both research and practice in this field. For a long time, especially since the end of the Cold War, the impact of security considerations on sanctions policy has been missing in the literature. I argue that it is important to take this perspective more strongly into account – not only since the start of the Russian aggression against Ukraine, but even more so because of it. I’m exciting to integrate our new dataset into this research, for example by analyzing the differential impact of individual sanctions on political, economic, and military elites.

Theory or practice?

In theory, I like to practice, but in practice, I do a lot of theory.

Big conference or small workshop?`

Small workshop any day! I prefer the in-depth comments and the allocated time for private conversations.