doctoral and postdoctoral projects
Doctoral
This page provides an overview of current and completed doctoral and postdoctoral projects.
1. Current projects
Enrica Fei: Post-2003 Iraq and the Islamic Republic of Iran: A Foucauldian Analysis (working title)
|
Enrica Fei is at the writing stage of her PhD project focusing on Shiʿa commonality between Iraq and Iran and how it impacts on the two countries’ inter-state relations. She is also an analyst for the consultant agency Gulf State Analytics, and a freelance journalist for Italian and international magazines. Her research interests include transnational Shi’a networks, communal mobilisation and identity-based conflicts, nationalism and nation-building processes in the Persian Gulf. She is also interested in migration and social and economic flows across the Mediterranean. Between 2015-2018, she worked as a research assistant at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies of the University of Exeter and, in 2010, for the University of Florence, where she collected data on migrants (mostly from Eastern Europe and North Africa) in the region of Tuscany, Italy. She holds an MA in International Relations from Ca' Foscari University of Venice; an MA in Migration Studies jointly from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Ca’ Foscari and Moulay Ismail University of Meknes; and a BA in Arabic and French Language and Literature from the University of Florence. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in the Persian Gulf for her PhD investigation, and in the Levant and North Africa for her previous research. She is a fluent Arabic speaker and in 2016-2017 she completed a full-6 level course of advanced Arabic at the Qasid institute, in Jordan. |
|
Buthaina Shaheen: Negotiating Identity and Agency in Global Modernity & Social Spatial Fields: The Palestinian Yarmouk Refugee Camp in Syria and Local-Global Interplays (working title)
|
Buthaina earned one Master’s degree in Global Studies and Cultural Studies from Roskilde University- Denmark and a second in Management of Development from Turin University- Italy, in cooperation with the International Training Center of the ILO. She studied English literature for her Bachelor’s degree and has a Diploma in pedagogy of teaching from Damascus University- Syria. Buthaina is fluent in Arabic, English, Italian and Danish and has working knowledge of Spanish, French and German. |
|
Jorge Sión: Die Wehrpflicht als Institution - Geschichte und Konsolidierung in Zentralamerika
|
Studied political science with a specialization in international relations (conflict research/security policy) and sociology at the University of Zurich (UZH) and military science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) and the Swiss Armed Forces Military Academy (MILAK). Further training in leadership, management, communication, and security. Doctoral candidate in political and social sciences at the University of the Federal Armed Forces in Munich (UniBw M). |
|
Katharina Konarek: Die deutschen politischen Stiftungen. Nichtregierungsorganisationen oder Teil des außenpolitischen Gefüges. Fallbeispiel Israel und Palästina (Arbeitstitel)
|
|
Katharina Konarek is the academic coordinator of the German funded Haifa Center for German and European Studies at the University of Haifa. Before, she worked as a project manager for the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in the Palestinian Territories and in Poland.
Mrs. Konarek studied at the Geschwister-Scholl-Institute at the Munich Ludwig Maximilian University, Birzeit University in Ramallah, and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She graduated in 2008 with a Magister Artium (M.A.) in Political Science and Intercultural Communication. In her Master thesis she analyzed the Palestinian Fatah. Currently she is conducting her PhD at both at the Bundeswehr University of Munich and the University of Haifa. From 2009 to 2012 she held a graduates stipend from the Friedrich Ebert Foundation.
In her research she is focusing on German foreign policy in the Middle East and the role of the German political foundations in Israel and the Palestinian Territories. In addition she is also working on European foreign policy and Migration. Her current publication is on “The German Political Foundations’ Work between Jerusalem, Ramallah and Tel Aviv” (2018), published by Springer. Her current research focuses on European Solidarity during COVID 19
Meia Research Profil: https://www.meia-research.org/english/experts/katharina-konarek/ |
2. Completed projects
Dr. Anna Reuß: Threat perception in the Arab Gulf states
|
|
Anna Reuß was a research assistant at the Chair of International Politics and Conflict Research from 2021 to May 2024. She has been a doctoral candidate at Prof. Dr. Stephan Stetter's chair since 2018. Her dissertation deals with security and threat perceptions and the question of how states establish their position in the international system. The project is funded by a research fellowship for doctoral candidates from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). |
Lidia Averbukh: Parallele Gruppenrechtssysteme im „jüdischen und demokratischen“ Staat Israel
|
Lidia Averbukh studied political science at the University of Applied Sciences in Munich. Her research stays have taken her to Russia, Israel, and the US, among other places. Since 2016, Lidia has been a research fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) in Berlin. She researches and advises on developments in Israeli politics and society and also focuses on German-Israeli relations and Israel's relations with Russia. In addition to publishing academic articles and political analyses, Lidia appears as an analyst and commentator in foreign and German media, such as the Jüdische Allgemeine.
|
|
Eva Herschinger: The Others. Security discourses on identity, hegemony and ethics
|
|
PD Dr. habil. Eva Herschinger is a senior researcher at the Center for Intelligence and Security Studies at the University of the Federal Armed Forces in Munich. She studied political science and German language and literature in Mannheim, Heidelberg, and Paris, completed an internship at the Axel Springer School of Journalism, and earned her doctorate at Jacobs University Bremen. After working at German universities and research institutes as well as the University of Aberdeen, she worked in extremism prevention at the Frankfurt am Main Police Headquarters. Her research focuses on terrorism, violent extremism, and radicalization.
|
Dorthe Siegmund: Lokale Friedensinitiativen im Spannungsfeld von Weltkultur und Konfliktkontext: Eine Analyse des Status und der Bedeutung israelischer und palästinensischer Nichtregierungsorganisationen
|
Dorthe Siegmund has been head of the Heinrich Böll Foundation's Palestine and Jordan office in Ramallah since November 2021. Prior to that, she worked as an advisor to the Joint Initiative for Humanitarian International Law in the Middle East of Misereor and Bread for the World.
As part of her doctoral studies, she undertook several months of research in Israel and Palestine and was a visiting scholar at the Leonard Davis Institute for International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
She researches and lectures on the following topics: International political sociology; norm diffusion in global society; theories and methods of conflict research (especially constructivist approaches); social and political transformation processes in the MENA region; human security; German and European foreign policy toward the Middle East conflict. Contact: |
|
Bettina Benzing: Gewalt in den Anden. Systemtheoretische Überlegungen zu Gewaltstrukturen in einer Postkonfliktgesellschaft, in Erscheinung, Springer VS Verlag in der Buchreihe Innovative Konfliktforschung
|
|
IIn her doctoral thesis, Bettina Benzing examined the persistence of violent structures in (post-)conflict societies using Colombia as a case study, taking into account Niklas Luhmann's systems theory. |
Mitra Moussa Nabo: Legitime Interventionen und unrechtmäßige Einmischungen. Transnationale Konflikte und regionale Ordnungsbildung im Nahen und Mittleren Osten. Der Libanonkonflikt von 2005-2008 und die Bedeutung der regionalen Akteure Iran, Saudi-Arabien und Syrien.(Arbeitstitel)
|
Dr. Mitra Moussa Nabo completed a master's degree in political science and history at the University of Osnabrück between 2003 and 2008. From 2009 to 2013, he earned his doctorate (Dr. phil.) at the Chair of International Politics and Conflict Research (Prof. Dr. Stephan Stetter) at the University of the Federal Armed Forces in Munich. Since 2017, Dr. Moussa Nabo has been a research associate at the National Center for Crime Prevention (NZK) in Bonn. He works in the field of evaluation research in extremism prevention. Since 2012, Dr. Moussa Nabo has been a lecturer at the University of the German Armed Forces in Munich. From 2017 to 2018, Dr. Moussa Nabo also worked as an external consultant on a Yemen project for the German Society for International Cooperation (GIZ) GmbH. From 2015 to 2016, he was a research assistant at the Chair of International Politics and Conflict Research at the University of the Federal Armed Forces in Munich in the project “Between Society and Regional Transformations: Christians, Christian Churches and Religion in a Changing Middle East.” From 2009 to 2012, Moussa Nabo also worked as a research assistant at the Chair of International Politics and Conflict Research at the University of the Federal Armed Forces in Munich.
Book publication:
Contact: |
|
Helena Reimer-Burgrova: Egypt’s endless state of emergency. The “war on terror” during the reign of Husni Mubarak (1981-2011)
|
|
Dr. Helena Reimer-Burgrova is a former associate researcher at the Institute for International Relations in Prague (CZ). She studied Middle Eastern Studies and International Relations in Pilsen (CZ), Amman (JO), Cambridge (UK), and Munich (DE), where she successfully completed her doctorate at the Institute for Political Science at the German Armed Forces University in Munich in 2017. Her book “Politics of violence and fear in MENA. The case of Egypt,” which builds on her doctoral thesis and further explores the securitization context in authoritarian regimes, will be published soon by Palgrave Macmillan. After successfully completing her doctorate, she left academia and now works as a management consultant for digitalization strategies in human resources at valantic. Contact
|
