Whether regarding drugs, trade, or migration, Mexico has been repeatedly criticised, cajoled, and threatened by Trump on the campaign trail. On the eve of his inauguration, this GIGA Talk will highlight the challenges facing Mexico with a second Trump presidency and discuss its readiness to resist those pressures.
Sixty years after the founding of the GIGA, historical legacies still drive the “one-way street” of research collaboration between Germany and Africa. Creative digital approaches, such as “big-team science,” are needed to accelerate joint knowledge creation with the continent.
The third MIASA Policy Conference “Dealing with conflict, preparing for sustainable peace” will provide space for exchange between researchers, policymakers and other key stakeholders in sustainable peace-making to present and discuss state-of-the-art research and its policy implications. Emphasis will be given to African perspectives on intervention practices and peacebuilding efforts on the continent, drawing on insights from both research and practice.
In nur zehn Tagen haben aufständische Gruppen unter Führung der islamistischen HTS die Diktatur von Präsident Assad gestürzt. Syrer:innen weltweit feiern und eine Rückkehr scheint in greifbare Nähe gerückt. Doch wie sieht die Zukunft Syriens aus? GIGA-Expert:innen diskutieren.
Opposition rebel groups have taken Aleppo within a very short space of time. GIGA expert Dr. André Bank explains how they went about it, the goals they are pursuing, and what this means for Assad and Syria.
Based on ethnographic research, this special issue sheds new light on the different dimensions to how work is regulated in Africa. Examined, for example, are the daily tasks of labour inspectors, the multiplicity of actors involved in urban markets, the contracting of construction workers, and more.
Donald Trumps Außenpolitik gilt als schwer vorhersehbar. Doch es gibt Parallelen zu rechtspopulistischen Führern weltweit. Von Erdoğan in der Türkei über Duterte auf den Philippinen und Orbán in Ungarn bis hin zu Modi in Indien: Die Außenpolitik populistischer Akteure ist berechenbarer als häufig angenommen.
Democracy builds on common principles such as elections, a division of power, and the rule of law. In practice, democratic institutions often underperform due to executives overstepping the mark, conflicts and power struggles causing a stalemate in the policy process, as well as governance instability.
Many rural areas in the Global South are facing tremendous challenges today, including persistent poverty, demographic pressure, climatic change, and an eroding resource base. Competition over land and resources affects the lives of rural populations in a multitude of ways.
Large parts of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East have been very seriously affected by COVID-19, with the states of the Global South showing a wide variety of reactions to its onset and the long-term effects of the pandemic continuing to play out today.
The trade war between the US and China and the deadlocks in the World Trade Organisation are two examples of the current crisis of globalisation. We investigate how the world trade order is influenced by domestic concerns, international negotiations, and geo-economic competition.
Around 80 million people have been forcibly displaced by war or political violence worldwide. Several million more have fled their homes because of environmental disasters and socio-economic marginalisation. As there is no immediate end in sight to this steadily increasing global trend, forced migration is one of the most pressing challenges facing world politics today. We focus on the background to this phenomenon in our study regions.
It is not only non-democratic regimes that resort to authoritarian practices. They can increasingly be found in use also in formally democratic states, as the examples of shrinking civic space, populism, and democratic backsliding show.
We work on the politics of climate change. We investigate options to enable low- and middle-income countries to achieve reduced carbon trajectories without compromising economic development and poverty reduction, alongside studying also the role of the Global South in international climate negotiations.
Religion is a key facet of society and affects politics and socio-economic development in a multitude of ways. In recent years, religion has increasingly become a source of contentious behaviour. Terrorist attacks, armed conflict, and xenophobia have all been making headlines here. At the same time, religion can also be a vital contributor to peace.
To overcome war and violent conflict, building and strengthening institutions for peace is crucial. This includes ones helping to support power-sharing in government, security sector reform, and other key processes. We investigate all these phenomena in our research, while paying equal attention to institutions and processes that may be an impediment to peace too.
The Indo-Pacific has emerged as the world’s economic and strategic centre of gravity, an area in which established and rising powers are now heavily competing with one another. Learn more about the GIGA’s research, knowledge-exchange, and policy-advice activities vis-à-vis this mega region, focusing in particular on the perspectives of governmental and non-governmental actors in the Indo-Pacific itself.
China is partner, competitor, and systemic rival to the European Union. But also a political actor that needs to be understood on its own terms. The GIGA offers significant expertise on China’s political and economic development as well as on the country’s role in both regional and global affairs.
The digital transformation underway globally is changing how we live and work, as well as how states relate to each other. Our researchers analyse related opportunities and challenges in the Global South as well as emerging instruments of foreign policy, such as digital diplomacy and cyber sanctions.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine once again raises the question of sanctions’ effectiveness. Economic sanctions are a popular foreign policy tool for addressing a wide range of international issues including armed conflict, human rights violations, and terrorism.
Democracy builds on common principles such as elections, a division of power, and the rule of law. In practice, democratic institutions often underperform due to executives overstepping the mark, conflicts and power struggles causing a stalemate in the policy process, as well as governance instability.
Many rural areas in the Global South are facing tremendous challenges today, including persistent poverty, demographic pressure, climatic change, and an eroding resource base. Competition over land and resources affects the lives of rural populations in a multitude of ways.
Large parts of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East have been very seriously affected by COVID-19, with the states of the Global South showing a wide variety of reactions to its onset and the long-term effects of the pandemic continuing to play out today.
The trade war between the US and China and the deadlocks in the World Trade Organisation are two examples of the current crisis of globalisation. We investigate how the world trade order is influenced by domestic concerns, international negotiations, and geo-economic competition.
Around 80 million people have been forcibly displaced by war or political violence worldwide. Several million more have fled their homes because of environmental disasters and socio-economic marginalisation. As there is no immediate end in sight to this steadily increasing global trend, forced migration is one of the most pressing challenges facing world politics today. We focus on the background to this phenomenon in our study regions.
It is not only non-democratic regimes that resort to authoritarian practices. They can increasingly be found in use also in formally democratic states, as the examples of shrinking civic space, populism, and democratic backsliding show.
We work on the politics of climate change. We investigate options to enable low- and middle-income countries to achieve reduced carbon trajectories without compromising economic development and poverty reduction, alongside studying also the role of the Global South in international climate negotiations.
Religion is a key facet of society and affects politics and socio-economic development in a multitude of ways. In recent years, religion has increasingly become a source of contentious behaviour. Terrorist attacks, armed conflict, and xenophobia have all been making headlines here. At the same time, religion can also be a vital contributor to peace.
To overcome war and violent conflict, building and strengthening institutions for peace is crucial. This includes ones helping to support power-sharing in government, security sector reform, and other key processes. We investigate all these phenomena in our research, while paying equal attention to institutions and processes that may be an impediment to peace too.
The Indo-Pacific has emerged as the world’s economic and strategic centre of gravity, an area in which established and rising powers are now heavily competing with one another. Learn more about the GIGA’s research, knowledge-exchange, and policy-advice activities vis-à-vis this mega region, focusing in particular on the perspectives of governmental and non-governmental actors in the Indo-Pacific itself.
China is partner, competitor, and systemic rival to the European Union. But also a political actor that needs to be understood on its own terms. The GIGA offers significant expertise on China’s political and economic development as well as on the country’s role in both regional and global affairs.
The digital transformation underway globally is changing how we live and work, as well as how states relate to each other. Our researchers analyse related opportunities and challenges in the Global South as well as emerging instruments of foreign policy, such as digital diplomacy and cyber sanctions.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine once again raises the question of sanctions’ effectiveness. Economic sanctions are a popular foreign policy tool for addressing a wide range of international issues including armed conflict, human rights violations, and terrorism.
Democracy builds on common principles such as elections, a division of power, and the rule of law. In practice, democratic institutions often underperform due to executives overstepping the mark, conflicts and power struggles causing a stalemate in the policy process, as well as governance instability.
Many rural areas in the Global South are facing tremendous challenges today, including persistent poverty, demographic pressure, climatic change, and an eroding resource base. Competition over land and resources affects the lives of rural populations in a multitude of ways.
Large parts of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East have been very seriously affected by COVID-19, with the states of the Global South showing a wide variety of reactions to its onset and the long-term effects of the pandemic continuing to play out today.
President (ad interim)
Prof. Dr. Sabine Kurtenbach is President (ad interim) of the GIGA.
Peace and conflict are not the same across territories and scales. Conceptualizing peace as a process based on three core functions of society and related norms allows us to identify variations in peacebuilding needs and perceptions. The entanglement of different scales shapes the diversity of peace and highlights the opportunities and challenges of peacebuilding and related norms, along with their diffusion and contestation.
Local actors should be involved in peacebuilding processes and security sector reforms (SSR). The book presents a feminist and intersectoral conceptualisation of SSR as well as quantitative and qualitative findings from 42 post-conflict societies as well as from Afghanistan and Colombia. Open Access until 11 December 2023!
„Sanktionen“ stellt fundiert, verständlich und anschaulich die Möglichkeiten und Fallstricke dieses zentralen Machtinstruments der internationalen Politik im 21. Jahrhundert vor und gibt einen Blick in die Zukunft: Wie werden Sanktionen künftig eingesetzt? Das Buch stellt Maßstäbe vor, die Europa und Deutschland bei der Verhängung ihrer Strafmaßnahmen in Zukunft leiten sollten.
Der Westen ist nicht mehr der Nabel der Welt. Stattdessen treten die Staaten des Globalen Südens mit neuem Selbstbewusstsein auf. Das Buch diskutiert, warum die Staaten des Globalen Südens so handeln, wie sie es tun, warum deren Skepsis gegenüber dem Westen so tief sitzt – und warum in der neuen Vielfalt auch Chancen liegen.
This book explores the pivotal role of the military in “dictators’ endgames” — large-scale nonviolent protests in autocracies demanding regime change. It reveals why some militaries repress protests, back the opposition, or stage coups, using a unique dataset and a multi-method analysis of 40 cases from 1946-2014.
With insights from more than 30 global experts on Global Perspectives on Responsible Economic Statecraft we discuss how economic tools can be used to navigate geopolitical tensions, balance diverging interests, and contribute to more stability through forward-looking and proactive strategies. Download the report in this page.
How is the behaviour of Latin American high courts in Twitter shaped by different levels of trust and political attacks experienced by the courts? This article shows that courts with lower levels of trust tend to be more active in social media and to produce more self-promotional or educational content than purely informational one.
Communism only lasted until the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the end of history was not far off either. Are we running out of ideas for the future? No. But in order to create positive images of future coexistence, we must learn to look ahead more courageously. Risks and side effects included. The essay has been awarded the 2024 Sylke Tempel Essay Prize.
The Ethics Guidelines of the German Network for Forced Migration Studies place the respect for human dignity and safeguarding the rights and well-being of all research participants, especially but not exclusively those with lived experience of displacement, at the heart of all research processes.
The project „Religion for Peace: Identifying Conditions and Mechanisms of Interfaith Peace“ explored ways to build and maintain peace between different religious groups. This illustrated summary presents key findings and highlights what we learned about interreligious peace, challenges involved, and ideas about what can be done to put interreligious peace together.
This article seeks to identify ways in which the foreign policy power hierarchy inside the Islamic Republic of Iran can be explained. It uses high-level diplomatic meetings as observable evidence in a novel analytical framework to identify the scope of competition and hierarchies in foreign policy decision-making processes. Results reveal that diplomatic activities of key foreign policy decision makers did not noticeably diverge.
This paper focuses on India’s multifaceted approach to its “China challenge” with and outside the climate regime. It examines whether this rivalry might lead to a breakdown of cooperation and an increased potential for conflict and weaponisation of seemingly disconnected issue-areas.
It depends on the personalization of foreign policy and its use for mobilizing domestic support, argue Sandra Destradi and Johannes Plagemann, in their article that explores the case-studies of Bolivia (under Evo Morales), India (under Narendra Modi) and the Philippines (under Rodrigo Duterte).
While the study of interreligious conflict is a growing field of research, interreligious peace lacks conceptualisation and empirical investigation. This article proposes a concept of interreligious peace that distinguishes between positive and negative elements as well as attitudinal and behavioural aspects.
What are the repercussions of the Gaza war in the Middle East? The article argues that the war has taken the region “forward to the past,” e.g. by revitalizing “Palestine” as a central issue and by increasing the regimes-people divide. At the same time, “Palestine” today has broader global resonance than previous Arab and Islamic framings.
This meticulously researched book offers a comprehensive analysis of strategic cooperation in authoritarian regimes, specifically focusing on Yemen’s Joint Meeting Parties—an alliance composed of diverse Islamist, Socialist, and Arab nationalist parties.
The Iraq War of 2003 has been described as a conflict over the meaning of Europe between a transatlantic and a more independent, “Carolingian” vision of the continent. As such, it highlighted the continued importance of a US-led NATO for defining such meaning.
Sometimes, people belonging to different religions do not get along well. In 2022 we travelled to Sierra Leone and Togo where interreligious relations were very peaceful. This comic depicts some examples of how to make interreligious peace: celebrating together, collaborating, being friends, and respecting each other despite differences.
Peace and conflict are not the same across territories and scales. Conceptualizing peace as a process based on three core functions of society and related norms allows us to identify variations in peacebuilding needs and perceptions. The entanglement of different scales shapes the diversity of peace and highlights the opportunities and challenges of peacebuilding and related norms, along with their diffusion and contestation.
Local actors should be involved in peacebuilding processes and security sector reforms (SSR). The book presents a feminist and intersectoral conceptualisation of SSR as well as quantitative and qualitative findings from 42 post-conflict societies as well as from Afghanistan and Colombia. Open Access until 11 December 2023!
„Sanktionen“ stellt fundiert, verständlich und anschaulich die Möglichkeiten und Fallstricke dieses zentralen Machtinstruments der internationalen Politik im 21. Jahrhundert vor und gibt einen Blick in die Zukunft: Wie werden Sanktionen künftig eingesetzt? Das Buch stellt Maßstäbe vor, die Europa und Deutschland bei der Verhängung ihrer Strafmaßnahmen in Zukunft leiten sollten.
Der Westen ist nicht mehr der Nabel der Welt. Stattdessen treten die Staaten des Globalen Südens mit neuem Selbstbewusstsein auf. Das Buch diskutiert, warum die Staaten des Globalen Südens so handeln, wie sie es tun, warum deren Skepsis gegenüber dem Westen so tief sitzt – und warum in der neuen Vielfalt auch Chancen liegen.
This book explores the pivotal role of the military in “dictators’ endgames” — large-scale nonviolent protests in autocracies demanding regime change. It reveals why some militaries repress protests, back the opposition, or stage coups, using a unique dataset and a multi-method analysis of 40 cases from 1946-2014.
With insights from more than 30 global experts on Global Perspectives on Responsible Economic Statecraft we discuss how economic tools can be used to navigate geopolitical tensions, balance diverging interests, and contribute to more stability through forward-looking and proactive strategies. Download the report in this page.
How is the behaviour of Latin American high courts in Twitter shaped by different levels of trust and political attacks experienced by the courts? This article shows that courts with lower levels of trust tend to be more active in social media and to produce more self-promotional or educational content than purely informational one.
Communism only lasted until the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the end of history was not far off either. Are we running out of ideas for the future? No. But in order to create positive images of future coexistence, we must learn to look ahead more courageously. Risks and side effects included. The essay has been awarded the 2024 Sylke Tempel Essay Prize.
The Ethics Guidelines of the German Network for Forced Migration Studies place the respect for human dignity and safeguarding the rights and well-being of all research participants, especially but not exclusively those with lived experience of displacement, at the heart of all research processes.
The project „Religion for Peace: Identifying Conditions and Mechanisms of Interfaith Peace“ explored ways to build and maintain peace between different religious groups. This illustrated summary presents key findings and highlights what we learned about interreligious peace, challenges involved, and ideas about what can be done to put interreligious peace together.
This article seeks to identify ways in which the foreign policy power hierarchy inside the Islamic Republic of Iran can be explained. It uses high-level diplomatic meetings as observable evidence in a novel analytical framework to identify the scope of competition and hierarchies in foreign policy decision-making processes. Results reveal that diplomatic activities of key foreign policy decision makers did not noticeably diverge.
This paper focuses on India’s multifaceted approach to its “China challenge” with and outside the climate regime. It examines whether this rivalry might lead to a breakdown of cooperation and an increased potential for conflict and weaponisation of seemingly disconnected issue-areas.
It depends on the personalization of foreign policy and its use for mobilizing domestic support, argue Sandra Destradi and Johannes Plagemann, in their article that explores the case-studies of Bolivia (under Evo Morales), India (under Narendra Modi) and the Philippines (under Rodrigo Duterte).
While the study of interreligious conflict is a growing field of research, interreligious peace lacks conceptualisation and empirical investigation. This article proposes a concept of interreligious peace that distinguishes between positive and negative elements as well as attitudinal and behavioural aspects.
What are the repercussions of the Gaza war in the Middle East? The article argues that the war has taken the region “forward to the past,” e.g. by revitalizing “Palestine” as a central issue and by increasing the regimes-people divide. At the same time, “Palestine” today has broader global resonance than previous Arab and Islamic framings.
This meticulously researched book offers a comprehensive analysis of strategic cooperation in authoritarian regimes, specifically focusing on Yemen’s Joint Meeting Parties—an alliance composed of diverse Islamist, Socialist, and Arab nationalist parties.
The Iraq War of 2003 has been described as a conflict over the meaning of Europe between a transatlantic and a more independent, “Carolingian” vision of the continent. As such, it highlighted the continued importance of a US-led NATO for defining such meaning.
Sometimes, people belonging to different religions do not get along well. In 2022 we travelled to Sierra Leone and Togo where interreligious relations were very peaceful. This comic depicts some examples of how to make interreligious peace: celebrating together, collaborating, being friends, and respecting each other despite differences.
Peace and conflict are not the same across territories and scales. Conceptualizing peace as a process based on three core functions of society and related norms allows us to identify variations in peacebuilding needs and perceptions. The entanglement of different scales shapes the diversity of peace and highlights the opportunities and challenges of peacebuilding and related norms, along with their diffusion and contestation.
Local actors should be involved in peacebuilding processes and security sector reforms (SSR). The book presents a feminist and intersectoral conceptualisation of SSR as well as quantitative and qualitative findings from 42 post-conflict societies as well as from Afghanistan and Colombia. Open Access until 11 December 2023!
„Sanktionen“ stellt fundiert, verständlich und anschaulich die Möglichkeiten und Fallstricke dieses zentralen Machtinstruments der internationalen Politik im 21. Jahrhundert vor und gibt einen Blick in die Zukunft: Wie werden Sanktionen künftig eingesetzt? Das Buch stellt Maßstäbe vor, die Europa und Deutschland bei der Verhängung ihrer Strafmaßnahmen in Zukunft leiten sollten.
