News of the GIGA Doctoral Programme

Richard Roewer successfully defended his dissertation titled “Undemocratic Democrats: A Case Study of the National League for Democracy” at the University of Oxford. Congratulations!

In the General Assembly of the Doctoral Researchers on 14 December 2022, Houssein Al Malla, Indi-Carolina Kryg, and Ardahan Özkan Gedikli were elected to be the new Representatives of the Doctoral Researchers from 2023 onwards. Congratulations! A big thank-you to the outgoing Representatives Askan Weidemann, Asma Khalifa and Jorge A. Rincón Barajas!

Hager Ali, together with Jonathan Powell and Salah Ben Hammou from the University of Central Florida, published a paper titled “Between Coups and Election: Constitutional Engineering and Military Entrenchment in Sudan!”. You can read the paper here. Additionally, the paper was cited in Deutsche Welle and Allafrica. You can read the article on „Sudan’s difficult path to democratic transition” here.

Ardahan Gedikli participated in a “Türkei-Tagung” dealing with searching for a New European Policy on Turkey. You can find further information on the conference here.

Dastan Jasim participated in the MESA Conference (Middle East Studies Association) in Denver, beginning of December, where she presented a paper on “Civic Culture and Support for Democracy amongst Kurds in Iran, Iraq and Turkey”.

Diba Mirzaei did archival research at the UK National Archives in London.

Indi Carolina-Kryg wrote an article on the activism of Latin American migrants in Mexico titled “Vier Frauen, ein gemeinsamer Kampf”, which was published in Lateinamerika Nachrichten and can be read here (in German).

Désirée Reder was cited in an article on the new relationship between El Salvador and China for Deutsche Welle, which can be read here (in Spanish).

In December, Alina Ripplinger participated in the Annual Seminar of the project ICCAL “Transformaciones interamericanas: Temas actuales”, at the Max-Planck Institute in Heidelberg, where she presented a book she co-authored titled “La Democracia ante la pandemia”, which you can find here. Additionally, she did a presentation on “La sociedad civil como actor político ante el cierre del espacio democrático: Nicaragua y El Salvador en tiempos de pandemia.” She furthermore participated in the Winter School “Communities of practice”, also at the MPIL. And she co-coordinated the workshop “Transitional Justice and Gender” and gave a presentation on “Justicia transicional anticipada. El rol de la Sociedad civil en Venezuela y Nicaragua desde el enfoque de género” where she moderated three lectures and discussion sessions.

Mira Demirdirek and Hamid Talebian wrote a GIGA Focus Global titled “Bolstering the Bromances: Turkey’s and Iran’s Tightening Ties with Africa”, which you can read here.

Jayane Maia was awarded a doctoral scholarship from the University of Erfurt to finish her dissertation. Furthermore, she attended the seminar “Política Subnacional en América Latina”, held in Lima, Peru on 17 and 18 November. She also presented a paper on the theoretical and methodological challenges posed by provincial electoral data in Argentina to measure party system change at the subnational level. Moreover, Jayane was a guest teacher at the Nova University Lisbon in a virtual class on electoral behavior in Brazil’s elections and she co-authored an article on the Brazilian elections that was recently published in the last Special Issue of the Brazilian journal Novos Olhares Sociais (to be read here (in Portuguese)).

Katharina Fietz presented the ongoing work of her first PhD paper “Exit patterns of Bolsa Familia and the role of the local labor market in Brazil” at the Winter Workshop of the Berlin Network of Labor Market Research (BeNA). Additionally, she presented her work at an internal workshop of the Development Economics Network Berlin (DENeB) and the University of Göttingen. As a member of DENeB she organised the workshop.