News of the GIGA Doctoral Programme

We welcome a new Visiting Doctoral Researcher, Stiven Tremaria, from the University of Osnabrück, who will stay with us until January 2023. He will be working on his dissertation titled “Policing and Regime Transformation: Venezuela, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Ukraine from a Comparative Perspective.”

Swantje Schirmer successfully defended her dissertation titled “Why do regional organisations use human rights for legitimation? Set-theoretic configurations of localisation, agents, and audiences of legitimation.“ at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg. Congratulations!

Ardahan Gedikli presented a paper titled “Turkish Public Diplomacy in Africa: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Erdogan’s Narratives” at the 9th Exploratory Symposia of EISA. You can find further information here.

Diba Mirzaei and Hamid Talebian wrote a GIGA Focus Article on the current Protests in Iran titled “Iran’s Uprisings: A Feminist Foreign Policy Approach”, which can be read here.

Désirée Reder was interviewed by the Deutsche Welle (DW) on the socio-economic situation in Nicaragua based on the latest World Bank Report. You can read the article here (in Spanish). In October, during the Hamburg Latin America and Caribbean Autumn Festival Désirée was taking part in a plenary discussion titled “Nicaragua 1990 till 2022 – a ‘successful’ revolution destroys its own achievements.” Furthermore, she was invited as a consultant by the Kommission Weltkirche of the German Bishops Conference, to talk about the “political developments in Nicaragua and the role of the Catholic Church” on October 26th, 2022.

After her fieldwork in Lomé (Togo), Julia Köbrich is now in Freetown (Sierra Leone), where she and Lisa Hoffmann will continue their quantitative field research, conducting 1000 surveys in each country.

Katharina Fietz gave an interview at WDR5 about the election in Brazil. You can listen to the Interview (in German) here. Additionally, she gave an interview at Deutschlandfunk NOVA about the consequences of the Brazilian election, which you can read here (in German).

In the Podcast “Tonspur Wissen” Dastan Jasim discussed the future of the protests in Iran and the possibility of a revolution. You can listen to it here. She furthermore co-authored an article titled “Revolution in Şino“ on the role of Kurds in the Iranian protests, which you can read here (in German).

Juliana Tappe Ortiz presented the paper “How leader prior combat experience influences the likelihood of peace agreements in civil conflicts” at the Peace Science Conference in Denver at the beginning of November.

Hager Ali, together with Jonathan Powell and Salah ben Hammou of the University of Central Florida, published a paper titled "Between Coups and Election: Constitutional Engineering and Military Entrechment in Sudan" in Africa Spectrum, which you can read here. Additionally, the paper was cited in Deutsche Welle and Allafrica "Sudan's difficult path to democratic transition".