News of the GIGA Doctoral Programme

On the 13th of October, Niklas Krösche successfully defended his dissertation “Explaining African Union Conflict and Crisis Interventions. The Drivers and Dynamics of Security Regionalism in Africa” at the Leuphana Universität Lüneburg. Congratulations!

Cornelius Haritz is invited to a workshop of the Research Centre “Transformations of Political Violence” (TraCe) (PRIF / Uni Frankfurt) with the topic "Internationalisation of Intrastate Conflict" on October 25 in Frankfurt. Moreover, he published a policy paper titled "Julian Assange: Why Germany should stand up for him as a pledge to respect human rights in East and West" on the blog of Polis180 e.V., of which he is a member.

Julia Köbrich was in Accra, Ghana, for the MIASA Mid-term Conference: Sustainable Governance in a Time of Global Flux: Issues, Concepts, and Future Directions, from the 19th to 21st September and presented a paper titled “Religious Leaders as Promoters of Peace? Experimental evidence from Sierra Leone and Togo”, which she co-authored with Lisa Hoffmann and Matthias Basedau. She then traveled to Lomé, Togo, where she and Lisa Hoffman organized a workshop in collaboration with CROP on the 25th and 26th to discuss issues related to interreligious peace in West Africa. Lisa and Julia presented the results of the DFG-funded project ‘Religion for Peace’. Moreover, her first article titled “What do we know about religion and interreligious peace? A review of the quantitative literature”, co-authored with Lisa Hoffmann, was published in Politics & Religion. Finally, she will travel by the end of October to Utrecht to meet her supervisors Borja Martinović and Tobias Stark, and fellow PhDs at ERCOMER.

Indi-Carolina Kryg participated and presented part of her dissertation in the seminar "2º Seminario Narrando Historias de Fronteras desde los Feminismos" in Mexico City (18th-20th September). The title of her presentation was: “Resistencia al orden hegemónico – Luchas políticas de mujeres inmigradas en México.”

Olena Osypenkova, one of our new Doctoral Researchers, had her joint review "War in Ukraine Threatens Food Security in Yemen" published in July for the CPD Policy Blog, Universität Graz. Furthermore, from 17 th-20th October, she will participate in the Lucerne Master Class (Switzerland) where she will present on "Proxy war in Yemen: the concept of intervention sub-types as ontological alternative for the direct/indirect binary."

Mira Demirdirek attended the International Congress of DAVO in Vienna in September where she presented a paper titled “Opening Pandora's Box? The Cyprus Crisis and the Changing Role of Africa in Turkey's Foreign Policy” in a panel with Jens Heibach on “Transregional (in)securities: Past and present security narratives in and on the Middle East.”

In September, Daniel Geissel was invited to an episode of the podcast 'Agrar aufs Ohr' ('Agricultural to the Ear') which focused on the multi-layered relationships between culture, environment, and the mental health of indigenous peoples (in German).

Hager Ali gave an interview at the beginning of October to the ‘Evangelische Pressedienst’ about the Authorities in Libya suppressing information about flood damage in Derna, discussing the different problems the country and the eastern region face.

At the beginning of October, Désirée Reder (together with Tevin Tafese and Nora Kürzdörfer) participated as a moderator and panelist at Neue Wege, neues Wissen: Forschung und Journalismus global und digital in the framework of the celebrations (Bürgerfest) for the Tag der Deutschen Einheit in Hamburg. In the week of 16th October, she will be at a Writing Week organized by scholarship holders of the SDW. Désirée will also present her work at the Workshop “América Central Hoy: Dilemas de poder entre los nuevos y viejos modelos de autoritarismo” organized by the LAI of the Freie Universität Berlin at the end of October.