News of the GIGA Doctoral Programme

In July, Niklas Krösche submitted his dissertation with the title “Explaining African Union Conflict and Crisis Interventions. The Drivers and Dynamics of Security Regionalism in Africa” at the Leuphana Universität Lüneburg. Congratulations!

Jorge Rincon has also submitted his dissertation titled “Current Issues on Rural Development: Land Tenure, Land Use Change and Climate Change“ at the Universität Gottingen. Congratulations!

In June and July, Eduardo Tamaki took a course on Advanced SEM (Structural Equation Modeling) at the Methods NET Summer School in Social Research Methods. In June, he also presented in IPSA the first paper of his Ph.D. dissertation and a paper on Brazil and Democratic Backsliding and was part of the discussion panel on Democratic and Antidemocratic Political Culture. In July, he taught the course “Introduction to R and basic statistics” for the Federal University of Minas Gerais. Furthermore, he wrote an opinion piece with Mariana Llanos on Argentina's Milei, which was featured in multiple outlets in Spanish and Portuguese, including LatinAmerica21 and Folha de Sao Paulo.

Jayane Maia published an article with co-authors about Brazil's multilevel party system over the last twenty years in the Bulletin of Latin American Research. Additionally, a special section she edited in collaboration with Mariana Llanos will be out soon.

Valeria Morales was selected by the Hemispheric University Consortium (HUC) to conduct a virtual research internship during the second semester of 2023. This internship is in the TRACE-LAC project by the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana and the Universidad de los Andes, which seeks to adequately and effectively inform decision-making in the response to infectious disease epidemics in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Désirée Reder attended the ECPR in Prague and presented her paper "Audience-Sensitivity of Political Discourse in the Legitimation of Repression". In early October, she will give another presentation at the INTERACT conference in Berlin. Furthermore, she is invited to present her Ph.D. project at the Latin America Institute (LAI) mid-October.

Hager Ali attended the ECPR general conference as well. She organized and chaired the panel "Classifying Contemporary Authoritarian and Hybrid Regimes: Old Questions, New Data, and Salvaged Concepts". She also presented two conference papers "Autocracies with Adjectives: The Need for Better Classifications of Autocratic Regimes" and "Entrenchment and Erosion, One Reform at a Time: Leveraging Constitutional and Electoral Legislation across Regime Types". And represented the editorial team of ECPR's political science blog "The Loop" as the Series Editor of Autocracies with Adjectives. Moreover, her inaugural blog post for the Series "Autocracies with Adjectives: Towards a better typology of authoritarianism (ecpr.eu)" was nominated and shortlisted as the Loop's Best Blogpost of 2022. Lastly, she will head to the Armed Forces and Society conference in Reston, VA/Washington DC next month to present two other working papers.

On September 25th, Alina Ripplinger will have her first Doctoral Board Assessment. She will also present a paper on the case of Nicaragua and civil society’s strategies for resistance at the Conference “Resisting the autocratic turn: Can (and should) autocratization be prevented, stopped, and resisted?” in Brussels, organized by CEVIPOL Brussels, and SCRIPTS Berlin, on the 28th-29th September.

Ardahan Özkan Gedikli was selected as a fellow of the Turkey Europe Future Forum 2023 where he presented a paper he co-authored “So Close Yet So Far: Turkey’s Relations with Germany in Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Narratives (2003-2018).