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35Symposium: The Contribution of Laclau’s Discourse Theory to International Relations and International Political Economy: IntroductionNew Political Science 41 (2): 248-262. 2019.This symposium explores the value of Poststructuralist (or Political) Discourse Theory (PDT) for the analysis of world politics. PDT was originally developed by the late Argentine political theorist Ernesto Laclau, in early works together with Chantal Mouffe, and has entered the margins of International Relations (IR) in recent years, mainly by bringing in poststructuralist concepts that had previously been ignored by the more critical strands of theorizing. Against this background, the introduc…Read more
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12Social Media, Gender and the Mediatisation of War: Exploring the German Armed Forces’ Visual Representation of the Afghanistan Operation on FacebookGlobal Discourse 7 (2-3): 330-347. 2017.Studies on the mediatisation of war point to attempts of governments to regulate the visual perspective of their involvements in armed conflict – the most notable example being the practice of ‘embedded reporting’ in Iraq and Afghanistan. This paper focuses on a different strategy of visual meaning-making, namely, the publication of images on social media by armed forces themselves. Specifically, we argue that the mediatisation of war literature could profit from an increased engagement with fem…Read more
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5Forget Populism!Global Discourse 9 (2): 445-451. 2019.This paper intervenes in the debate about the so-called ‘populist danger’, whose proponents claim that populism constitutes a threat to democracy, European integration, the West, the liberal international order, or all of the above. This paper argues that this argument is severely misguided – with significant consequences for research and political practice. The core problem is that claims of a ‘populist danger’ are based on an exceptionally vague conceptualization of populism that fails to clea…Read more
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31Securitization as Discursive (Re)Articulation: Explaining the Relative Effectiveness of Threat ConstructionNew Political Science 41 (2): 294-312. 2019.This article develops a poststructuralist framework for the analysis of the process of threat construction or securitization. Taking on-going debates in securitization theory about the securitizing process as a starting point, the article draws on the poststructuralist discourse theory of the Essex School to theorize what makes some securitizing moves (attempts to securitize a certain issue) more effective than others, which remains a persistent and crucial gap in the current literature.
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208If You’re Not Scared, You Haven’t Been Paying Attention: Trump, the Radicalization of the GOP, and the Future of US DemocracyAustrian Journal of Political Science. forthcoming.The article discusses the future of US democracy after the end of Donald J. Trump’s scandal-ridden presidency, which culminated in a violent attempted self-coup. In contrast to many observers outside the United States who appear to assume that Joe Biden’s inauguration marks the failure of the coup attempt, I argue that this view is overly optimistic. First, Trump by no means acted alone but was supported by leading figures in the Republican Party (GOP). Second, the attack on democratic norms and…Read more
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461The Politics of Military Force: Antimilitarism, Ideational Change, and Post-Cold War German Security DiscourseUniversity of Michigan Press. 2020.The Politics of Military Force uses discourse theory to examine the dynamics of discursive change that made participation in military operations possible against the background of German antimilitarist culture. Once considered a strict taboo, so-called out-of-area operations have now become widely considered by German policymakers to be without alternative. The book argues that an understanding of how certain policies are made possible (in this case, military operations abroad and force transfor…Read more
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29International/Global Political SociologyIn Renée Marlin-Bennett (ed.), The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies. 2019.International Political Sociology (IPS) emerged as a subfield of International Relations (IR) in the early 2000s. IPS itself may be understood as constituted by a field of tension between the concepts of “the International,” “the Political,” and “the Social.” Against this background, the centrality of anarchy and sovereignty as the fundamental structuring principles of international politics are increasingly called into question. While IPS remains an exciting, creative and important endeavor, re…Read more
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14The Political Production of Ethical War: Rethinking the Ethics/Politics Nexus with LaclauCritical Studies on Security 7 (3): 230-242. 2019.Taking Maja Zehfuss’s War & the Politics of Ethics as a starting point, this paper thinks through the ethics/politics nexus from the perspective of ‘Essex School’ poststructuralist discourse theory. Specifically, it asks how ethics – or, rather, morality, the temporary, contingent and context-dependent normative framework that regulates what is commonly seen as good or bad within a given society – is produced. From a discourse theoretical perspective, notions of the moral good are the result of …Read more
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297Militarizing Antimilitarism? Exploring the Gendered Representation of Military Service in German Recruitment Videos on Social MediaInternational Feminist Journal of Politics 1 (online first). 2021.This article analyzes the gendered representation of military service in the German YouTube series Die Rekruten (DR) (The Recruits), a popular web series produced on behalf of the German armed forces (Bundeswehr) for recruitment purposes, which accompanies 12 navy recruits during their basic training. The article is situated within research on masculinity and the military, in particular military recruitment. It supplements current scholarship by studying a previously neglected case that is of pa…Read more
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10Populism and World Politics: Exploring Inter- and Transnational Dimensions (edited book)Palgrave Macmillan. 2019.First book-length treatment of populism from an International Relations (IR) perspective Discusses what populism means for world politics (including foreign policy, global governance, international conflict and cooperation, security communities, regional and world order, etc.) Addresses the question, how does the “global rise of populism” (Moffitt 2016) manifest itself in foreign policy and international politics?
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Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu KielResearch Group On International Political SociologyLecturer
Kiel, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany
Areas of Interest
Political Science |
Sociology |
Political Theory |
Philosophy of Political Science |