Christian Fröhlich
Biographic Data
| ID | 277797 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Christian Fröhlich |
| GIVEN NAMES | Christian |
| FAMILY NAME | Fröhlich |
| SIGNATURE | FRÖHLICH C |
| AFFILIATIONS | German Institute for Global and Area Studies |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1802-0419 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 295 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Managing Import Dependency Risks in Contexts of Polycrises: The Case of Jordan
This study examines the critical role of trade facilitation in enhancing food security in Jordan, a country where 90% of essential food items are imported. Despite being a regional leader in implementing the WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA), Jordan faces persistent challenges due to logistical inefficiencies, institutional fragmentation, and high agricultural trade costs. Using Causal Process Tracing (CPT), the research evaluates how trade …
Migration as Crisis? German Migration Discourse at Critical Points of Nation-Building
This article enquires how the Federal Republic of Germany has governed migration at critical junctures of German nation-building within a growing European Union. Drawing on the documents on "Einwanderung" (immigration) from the archive of the German Bundestag from 1949 until 2022, and on secondary literature and media representations of (forced) migration, migrants, and refugees, this article traces different depictions of migration in German pol…
Entangled Crisis Narratives in Germany: Strengthening the Anti-Systemic Public
This article studies how crisis management and its narrative discourse are able to strengthen anti-systemic and far-right narratives. We compare government and opposition discourses during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020/2022 and the energy/inflation crisis of 2022/2023 in the German federal state of Saxony. The paper argues that the two crises were intertwined not only through the existence of a 'new cleavage' between political mainstream and righ…
Disentangling Forced Migration Governance: Actors and Drivers Along the Displacement Continuum
In this paper, we study the question of who and what drives forced migration governance in origin, host, and transit states, drawing on empirical material from the contemporary Syrian and Libyan, and the historical Algerian displacement situations. These three cases are examples for different forced migration governance approaches, ranging from open-supportive (Algeria), to restrictive-selective (Syria) and laissez-faire (Libya). We identify thre…
Sub‐Saharan Africa: Towards better governance and sustainability
The countries of the Sub‐Saharan region have, on average, made significant progress in governance performance, especially in terms of democratic accountability and public goods provision—findings that seem to contradict patterns of state fragility and economic underdevelopment common in the region. This article explores this seeming contradiction and presents in more detail findings from the Berggruen Governance Index regarding the governance per…
Debunking the autocratic fallacy? Improving public goods delivery in Russia
Russia's invasion of Ukraine has not only deeply challenged Russia's international standing but has also endangered its fragile domestic order. Data from the 2022 Berggruen Governance Index reveals that overall state capacity has been stagnating at a fairly low level since the beginning of the millennium, while democratic accountability has been declining steadily and profoundly. In contrast, the provision of public goods has strongly increased d…
Unfinished revolutions: The post‐Soviet crisis of governance in Ukraine
None of the three revolutions in Ukraine's modern history as an independent state has been able to both solve the problem of political representation and undertake the task of building sustainable democratic institutions. Ukraine's scores from the Berggruen Governance Index (BGI) between 2000 and 2019 show the ups and downs of state capacity and democratic accountability and illustrate not only how the revolutions remain unfinished but also how t…
Communicating the Social Responsibility of Big Business in Russia: Assessing How Large Companies Report Their Engagement in Social Welfare for People with Disabilities
This essay investigates how large companies in Russia communicate their engagement with the social welfare of people with disabilities. We analysed non-financial reports and studied how people with disabilities are addressed with regard to internal social policies and corporate social responsibility activities. We asked about the content and meaning of the reporting and built a typology of companies’ reported activities regarding welfare and incl…
Mobility control as state-making in civil war: Forcing exit, selective return and strategic laissez-faire
This paper addresses the question of how different actors attempt to control mobility during civil war, and how mobility control and processes of state-making interact in such settings. Mobility in civil wars is often considered a political act by the various actors involved: Leaving the country can be perceived as an act of opposition, as can moving between territories which are controlled by different, opposing factions. Drawing on literature o…
Pathways to water conflict during drought in the Mena region
As hydro-meteorological hazards are predicted to become more frequent and intense in the future, scholars and policymakers are increasingly concerned about their security implications, especially in the context of ongoing climate change. Our study contributes to this debate by analysing the pathways to water-related conflict onset under drought conditions in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region between 1996 and 2009. It is also the firs…
The governance of Syrian refugees in the Middle East: Lessons from the Jordan and Lebanon Compacts
Fleeing war, repression, and economic breakdown in their home country, Syrians have become the largest group of refugees in the Middle East. Relative to their own populations, neighboring Jordan and Lebanon have hosted the most Syrians per capita. While both are small, middle-income, and resource-poor countries, the perception of their respective governance of Syrian refugees has been diametrically different: While the 2016 Jordan Compact has bee…
Digital Humanitarianism and the Visual Politics of the Refugee Camp: (Un)Seeing Control
Digital visual technologies have become an important tool of humanitarian governance. They allow the monitoring of crises from afar, making it possible to detect human rights violations and refugee movements, despite a crisis area being inaccessible. However, the political effects of such 'digital humanitarianism' are understudied. This article aims to amend this gap by analyzing which forms of seeing, showing, and governing refugee camps are ena…
The Changing Space for NGOs: Civil Society in Authoritarian and Hybrid Regimes
In this introductory essay to the special issue on civil society in authoritarian and hybrid regimes, we review core themes in the growing literature on shrinking or closing space for civil society. We discuss the role of civil society organizations (CSOs) as agents of democratization and note the emergence of dual, at times apparently conflicting policy postures within authoritarian regimes (restriction and repression for some CSOs vs. financial…
Two for One: Public Welfare and Regime Legitimacy Through State Funding for CSOs in Russia
Civil societies are usually seen as facilitators of democracy or as oppositional powers withstanding authoritarian rule. However, more and more often civil society organizations (CSOs) appear to contribute to the legitimacy of non-democratic incumbents. Taking the example of contemporary Russia, this paper argues that state funding for CSOs under authoritarian regime conditions serves for securing regime legitimacy in two respects—by supporting C…
Advocacy in authoritarian contexts: The case of disability NGOs in Russia
Purpose The growing trend towards closing the political space for civil society in authoritarian regimes has primarily targeted NGOs focused on rights-based advocacy. Drawing on a study of disability NGOs in Russia, this paper seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the advocacy options that nonprofit organizations have even in repressive political contexts. The authors first review the extant literature to identify common actors, types …
Migration and Conflict in a Global Warming Era: A Political Understanding of Climate Change
This special issue explores underrepresented aspects of the political dimensions of global warming. It includes post- and decolonial perspectives on climate-related migration and conflict, intersectional approaches, and climate change politics as a new tool of governance. Its aim is to shed light on the social phenomena associated with anthropogenic climate change. The different contributions aim to uncover its multidimensional and far-reaching p…
Climate migration myths
Urban citizenship under post-Soviet conditions: Grassroots struggles of residents in contemporary Moscow
This paper studies local urban activism in contemporary Russia and relates neighborhood protests and urban citizenship to conflicts over housing-related public space. It situates Moscow as a cumulative space of post-Soviet neoliberal and authoritarian urban development and shows how and why Muscovites have opposed this development by engaging in local grassroots initiatives. The empirical analysis employs data from interviews with participants in…
Performing Resistance: Liminality, Infrapolitics, and Spatial Contestation in Contemporary Russia
This article explores protest tactics in Russian cities, stressing the liminality of spatial contestation practices. In this authoritarian context, spatial contestation typically has a liminal character, where citizens employ strategic ambiguity of their actions vis‐á‐vis (a) legal regulations, (b) official discourse, and (c) transcripts of legitimate behaviour. Showing how urbanites develop creative and subversive infrapolitical forms of resista…
From climate migration to anthropocene mobilities: Shifting the Debate
‘The Anthropocene epoch,’ as Claire Colebrook describes it, ‘appears to mark as radical a shift in species awareness as Darwinian evolution effected for the nineteenth century’ (Colebrook 2017). Th
Radical Left Movements in Europe
When the Iron Curtain lifted in 1989, it was seen by some as proof of the final demise of the ideas and aspirations of the radical left. Not many years passed, however, before the critique of capit
Climate change and the Syrian civil war revisited: A rejoinder
Climate change and the Syrian civil war revisited
For proponents of the view that anthropogenic climate change will become a ‘threat multiplier’ for instability in the decades ahead, the Syrian civil war has become a recurring reference point, providing apparently compelling evidence that such conflict effects are already with us. According to this view, human-induced climatic change was a contributory factor in the extreme drought experienced within Syria prior to its civil war; this drought in…
States Shaping Civic Activism: Comparing Animal Rights Activism in Poland and Russia
This article offers a comparative study of animal rights and animal welfare activism in Poland and Russia. It investigates how an East European democratic state, on the one hand, and a post-Soviet semiauthoritarian state, on the other hand, steer civic activism and how different state–society relationships affect the forms that activism takes. The analysis aims at identifying the specific institutional mechanisms by which steering operates in the…
Climate change, migration and violent conflict: Vulnerabilities, pathways and adaptation strategies
It has often been predicted that large numbers of people will be displaced by climate change and that this will lead to violent conflict. At the core of this prediction is a simple causal model which assumes that climate change will result in resource scarcities, which in turn will drive migration as well as violent conflict. Academic research into the links between climate change, migration and conflict has questioned such predictions; their the…
The Changing Space for NGOs: Civil Society in Authoritarian and Hybrid Regimes
In this introductory essay to the special issue on civil society in authoritarian and hybrid regimes, we review core themes in the growing literature on shrinking or closing space for civil society. We discuss the role of civil society organizations (CSOs) as agents of democratization and note the emergence of dual, at times apparently conflicting policy postures within authoritarian regimes (restriction and repression for some CSOs vs. financial…
Climate change and the Syrian civil war revisited
For proponents of the view that anthropogenic climate change will become a ‘threat multiplier’ for instability in the decades ahead, the Syrian civil war has become a recurring reference point, providing apparently compelling evidence that such conflict effects are already with us. According to this view, human-induced climatic change was a contributory factor in the extreme drought experienced within Syria prior to its civil war; this drought in…
Civil society and the state intertwined: The case of disability NGOs in Russia
This article examines state–civil society relationships in contemporary Russia. Its objective is to assess opportunity structures of Russian non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that are intertwined with the state. The article presents qualitative data from fieldwork in the Russian cities of Moscow, St Petersburg, Nizhniy Novgorod, and Perm in 2009 and 2010. The focus of NGOs in the field of disability was chosen because of their roles as social…
From climate migration to anthropocene mobilities: Shifting the Debate
‘The Anthropocene epoch,’ as Claire Colebrook describes it, ‘appears to mark as radical a shift in species awareness as Darwinian evolution effected for the nineteenth century’ (Colebrook 2017). Th
Urban citizenship under post-Soviet conditions: Grassroots struggles of residents in contemporary Moscow
This paper studies local urban activism in contemporary Russia and relates neighborhood protests and urban citizenship to conflicts over housing-related public space. It situates Moscow as a cumulative space of post-Soviet neoliberal and authoritarian urban development and shows how and why Muscovites have opposed this development by engaging in local grassroots initiatives. The empirical analysis employs data from interviews with participants in…
Climate migrants as protestors? Dispelling misconceptions about global environmental change in pre-revolutionary Syria
For a growing number of commentators, the Syrian uprising is explained by a prolonged drought period immediately preceding the outbreak of conflict in Syria in 2011. In this narrative, the marginalized ‘climate migrants’ are seen as a decisive factor for the onset of conflict. In this paper the author dispels these assumptions by arguing for a more complex approach that takes into consideration pre-existing internal migration patterns – social, d…
Two for One: Public Welfare and Regime Legitimacy Through State Funding for CSOs in Russia
Civil societies are usually seen as facilitators of democracy or as oppositional powers withstanding authoritarian rule. However, more and more often civil society organizations (CSOs) appear to contribute to the legitimacy of non-democratic incumbents. Taking the example of contemporary Russia, this paper argues that state funding for CSOs under authoritarian regime conditions serves for securing regime legitimacy in two respects—by supporting C…
Performing Resistance: Liminality, Infrapolitics, and Spatial Contestation in Contemporary Russia
This article explores protest tactics in Russian cities, stressing the liminality of spatial contestation practices. In this authoritarian context, spatial contestation typically has a liminal character, where citizens employ strategic ambiguity of their actions vis‐á‐vis (a) legal regulations, (b) official discourse, and (c) transcripts of legitimate behaviour. Showing how urbanites develop creative and subversive infrapolitical forms of resista…
Mobility control as state-making in civil war: Forcing exit, selective return and strategic laissez-faire
This paper addresses the question of how different actors attempt to control mobility during civil war, and how mobility control and processes of state-making interact in such settings. Mobility in civil wars is often considered a political act by the various actors involved: Leaving the country can be perceived as an act of opposition, as can moving between territories which are controlled by different, opposing factions. Drawing on literature o…
Digital Humanitarianism and the Visual Politics of the Refugee Camp: (Un)Seeing Control
Digital visual technologies have become an important tool of humanitarian governance. They allow the monitoring of crises from afar, making it possible to detect human rights violations and refugee movements, despite a crisis area being inaccessible. However, the political effects of such 'digital humanitarianism' are understudied. This article aims to amend this gap by analyzing which forms of seeing, showing, and governing refugee camps are ena…
Gender, Conflict, and Global Environmental Change
Gender has long been identified as an important variable in both conflict (de-)escalation processes and vulnerability or adaptive capacity toward global environmental change. We understand gender a
Pathways to water conflict during drought in the Mena region
As hydro-meteorological hazards are predicted to become more frequent and intense in the future, scholars and policymakers are increasingly concerned about their security implications, especially in the context of ongoing climate change. Our study contributes to this debate by analysing the pathways to water-related conflict onset under drought conditions in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region between 1996 and 2009. It is also the firs…
Climate change and the Syrian civil war revisited: A rejoinder
Disentangling Forced Migration Governance: Actors and Drivers Along the Displacement Continuum
In this paper, we study the question of who and what drives forced migration governance in origin, host, and transit states, drawing on empirical material from the contemporary Syrian and Libyan, and the historical Algerian displacement situations. These three cases are examples for different forced migration governance approaches, ranging from open-supportive (Algeria), to restrictive-selective (Syria) and laissez-faire (Libya). We identify thre…
Advocacy in authoritarian contexts: The case of disability NGOs in Russia
Purpose The growing trend towards closing the political space for civil society in authoritarian regimes has primarily targeted NGOs focused on rights-based advocacy. Drawing on a study of disability NGOs in Russia, this paper seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the advocacy options that nonprofit organizations have even in repressive political contexts. The authors first review the extant literature to identify common actors, types …
The governance of Syrian refugees in the Middle East: Lessons from the Jordan and Lebanon Compacts
Fleeing war, repression, and economic breakdown in their home country, Syrians have become the largest group of refugees in the Middle East. Relative to their own populations, neighboring Jordan and Lebanon have hosted the most Syrians per capita. While both are small, middle-income, and resource-poor countries, the perception of their respective governance of Syrian refugees has been diametrically different: While the 2016 Jordan Compact has bee…
Migration and Conflict in a Global Warming Era: A Political Understanding of Climate Change
This special issue explores underrepresented aspects of the political dimensions of global warming. It includes post- and decolonial perspectives on climate-related migration and conflict, intersectional approaches, and climate change politics as a new tool of governance. Its aim is to shed light on the social phenomena associated with anthropogenic climate change. The different contributions aim to uncover its multidimensional and far-reaching p…
Security and discourse: The Israeli-Palestinian water conflict
When conflictive viewpoints are discursively strengthened, they develop into a 'conflict discourse' with a specific discursive structure which perpetuates conflict, like the discursive securitisation of an issue for varying audiences. When they are weakened, however, societal discourse can potentially change so that agreement becomes possible again, thus achieving discursive conflict transformation. This article analyses the Israeli and the Pales…
Communicating the Social Responsibility of Big Business in Russia: Assessing How Large Companies Report Their Engagement in Social Welfare for People with Disabilities
This essay investigates how large companies in Russia communicate their engagement with the social welfare of people with disabilities. We analysed non-financial reports and studied how people with disabilities are addressed with regard to internal social policies and corporate social responsibility activities. We asked about the content and meaning of the reporting and built a typology of companies’ reported activities regarding welfare and incl…
Struggle over public space: Grassroots movements in Moscow and Vilnius
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore urban mobilisation patterns in two post-Soviet cities: Vilnius and Moscow. Both cities were subject to similar housing and urban policy during Soviet times, and they have implemented urban development using neoliberal market principles, provoking grassroots opposition from citizens to privatisation and marketisation of their housing environment and local public space. However, the differing condit…
Migration as Crisis? German Migration Discourse at Critical Points of Nation-Building
This article enquires how the Federal Republic of Germany has governed migration at critical junctures of German nation-building within a growing European Union. Drawing on the documents on "Einwanderung" (immigration) from the archive of the German Bundestag from 1949 until 2022, and on secondary literature and media representations of (forced) migration, migrants, and refugees, this article traces different depictions of migration in German pol…
Entangled Crisis Narratives in Germany: Strengthening the Anti-Systemic Public
This article studies how crisis management and its narrative discourse are able to strengthen anti-systemic and far-right narratives. We compare government and opposition discourses during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020/2022 and the energy/inflation crisis of 2022/2023 in the German federal state of Saxony. The paper argues that the two crises were intertwined not only through the existence of a 'new cleavage' between political mainstream and righ…
States Shaping Civic Activism: Comparing Animal Rights Activism in Poland and Russia
This article offers a comparative study of animal rights and animal welfare activism in Poland and Russia. It investigates how an East European democratic state, on the one hand, and a post-Soviet semiauthoritarian state, on the other hand, steer civic activism and how different state–society relationships affect the forms that activism takes. The analysis aims at identifying the specific institutional mechanisms by which steering operates in the…
Climate Change, Security Risks, and Violent Conflicts: Essays from Integrated Climate Research in Hamburg
Research on security-related aspects of climate change is an important element of climate change impact assessments. Hamburg has become a globally recognized center of pertinent analysis of the climate-conflict-nexus. The essays in this collection present a sample of the research conducted from 2009 to 2018 within an interdisciplinary cooperation of experts from Universität Hamburg and other institutions in Hamburg related to the research group "…
Der israelischpalästinensische Wasserkonflikt
In der Forschung zum israelisch-palästinensischen Konflikt verschwindet das fluide Wasserthema hinter den großen geopolitischen Themen wie Sicherheit, Grenzen und Jerusalem. In einer detaillierten Bet
Civil society and the state intertwined: The case of disability NGOs in Russia
This article examines state–civil society relationships in contemporary Russia. Its objective is to assess opportunity structures of Russian non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that are intertwined with the state. The article presents qualitative data from fieldwork in the Russian cities of Moscow, St Petersburg, Nizhniy Novgorod, and Perm in 2009 and 2010. The focus of NGOs in the field of disability was chosen because of their roles as social…
Security and discourse: The Israeli-Palestinian water conflict
When conflictive viewpoints are discursively strengthened, they develop into a 'conflict discourse' with a specific discursive structure which perpetuates conflict, like the discursive securitisation of an issue for varying audiences. When they are weakened, however, societal discourse can potentially change so that agreement becomes possible again, thus achieving discursive conflict transformation. This article analyses the Israeli and the Pales…
Gender, Conflict, and Global Environmental Change
Gender has long been identified as an important variable in both conflict (de-)escalation processes and vulnerability or adaptive capacity toward global environmental change. We understand gender a
Struggle over public space: Grassroots movements in Moscow and Vilnius
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore urban mobilisation patterns in two post-Soviet cities: Vilnius and Moscow. Both cities were subject to similar housing and urban policy during Soviet times, and they have implemented urban development using neoliberal market principles, provoking grassroots opposition from citizens to privatisation and marketisation of their housing environment and local public space. However, the differing condit…
Climate change, migration and violent conflict: Vulnerabilities, pathways and adaptation strategies
It has often been predicted that large numbers of people will be displaced by climate change and that this will lead to violent conflict. At the core of this prediction is a simple causal model which assumes that climate change will result in resource scarcities, which in turn will drive migration as well as violent conflict. Academic research into the links between climate change, migration and conflict has questioned such predictions; their the…
Climate migrants as protestors? Dispelling misconceptions about global environmental change in pre-revolutionary Syria
For a growing number of commentators, the Syrian uprising is explained by a prolonged drought period immediately preceding the outbreak of conflict in Syria in 2011. In this narrative, the marginalized ‘climate migrants’ are seen as a decisive factor for the onset of conflict. In this paper the author dispels these assumptions by arguing for a more complex approach that takes into consideration pre-existing internal migration patterns – social, d…
Radical Left Movements in Europe
When the Iron Curtain lifted in 1989, it was seen by some as proof of the final demise of the ideas and aspirations of the radical left. Not many years passed, however, before the critique of capit
Climate change and the Syrian civil war revisited: A rejoinder
Climate change and the Syrian civil war revisited
For proponents of the view that anthropogenic climate change will become a ‘threat multiplier’ for instability in the decades ahead, the Syrian civil war has become a recurring reference point, providing apparently compelling evidence that such conflict effects are already with us. According to this view, human-induced climatic change was a contributory factor in the extreme drought experienced within Syria prior to its civil war; this drought in…
States Shaping Civic Activism: Comparing Animal Rights Activism in Poland and Russia
This article offers a comparative study of animal rights and animal welfare activism in Poland and Russia. It investigates how an East European democratic state, on the one hand, and a post-Soviet semiauthoritarian state, on the other hand, steer civic activism and how different state–society relationships affect the forms that activism takes. The analysis aims at identifying the specific institutional mechanisms by which steering operates in the…
Climate migration myths
Urban citizenship under post-Soviet conditions: Grassroots struggles of residents in contemporary Moscow
This paper studies local urban activism in contemporary Russia and relates neighborhood protests and urban citizenship to conflicts over housing-related public space. It situates Moscow as a cumulative space of post-Soviet neoliberal and authoritarian urban development and shows how and why Muscovites have opposed this development by engaging in local grassroots initiatives. The empirical analysis employs data from interviews with participants in…
Performing Resistance: Liminality, Infrapolitics, and Spatial Contestation in Contemporary Russia
This article explores protest tactics in Russian cities, stressing the liminality of spatial contestation practices. In this authoritarian context, spatial contestation typically has a liminal character, where citizens employ strategic ambiguity of their actions vis‐á‐vis (a) legal regulations, (b) official discourse, and (c) transcripts of legitimate behaviour. Showing how urbanites develop creative and subversive infrapolitical forms of resista…
From climate migration to anthropocene mobilities: Shifting the Debate
‘The Anthropocene epoch,’ as Claire Colebrook describes it, ‘appears to mark as radical a shift in species awareness as Darwinian evolution effected for the nineteenth century’ (Colebrook 2017). Th
The Changing Space for NGOs: Civil Society in Authoritarian and Hybrid Regimes
In this introductory essay to the special issue on civil society in authoritarian and hybrid regimes, we review core themes in the growing literature on shrinking or closing space for civil society. We discuss the role of civil society organizations (CSOs) as agents of democratization and note the emergence of dual, at times apparently conflicting policy postures within authoritarian regimes (restriction and repression for some CSOs vs. financial…
Two for One: Public Welfare and Regime Legitimacy Through State Funding for CSOs in Russia
Civil societies are usually seen as facilitators of democracy or as oppositional powers withstanding authoritarian rule. However, more and more often civil society organizations (CSOs) appear to contribute to the legitimacy of non-democratic incumbents. Taking the example of contemporary Russia, this paper argues that state funding for CSOs under authoritarian regime conditions serves for securing regime legitimacy in two respects—by supporting C…
Advocacy in authoritarian contexts: The case of disability NGOs in Russia
Purpose The growing trend towards closing the political space for civil society in authoritarian regimes has primarily targeted NGOs focused on rights-based advocacy. Drawing on a study of disability NGOs in Russia, this paper seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the advocacy options that nonprofit organizations have even in repressive political contexts. The authors first review the extant literature to identify common actors, types …
Migration and Conflict in a Global Warming Era: A Political Understanding of Climate Change
This special issue explores underrepresented aspects of the political dimensions of global warming. It includes post- and decolonial perspectives on climate-related migration and conflict, intersectional approaches, and climate change politics as a new tool of governance. Its aim is to shed light on the social phenomena associated with anthropogenic climate change. The different contributions aim to uncover its multidimensional and far-reaching p…
Pathways to water conflict during drought in the Mena region
As hydro-meteorological hazards are predicted to become more frequent and intense in the future, scholars and policymakers are increasingly concerned about their security implications, especially in the context of ongoing climate change. Our study contributes to this debate by analysing the pathways to water-related conflict onset under drought conditions in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region between 1996 and 2009. It is also the firs…
The governance of Syrian refugees in the Middle East: Lessons from the Jordan and Lebanon Compacts
Fleeing war, repression, and economic breakdown in their home country, Syrians have become the largest group of refugees in the Middle East. Relative to their own populations, neighboring Jordan and Lebanon have hosted the most Syrians per capita. While both are small, middle-income, and resource-poor countries, the perception of their respective governance of Syrian refugees has been diametrically different: While the 2016 Jordan Compact has bee…
Digital Humanitarianism and the Visual Politics of the Refugee Camp: (Un)Seeing Control
Digital visual technologies have become an important tool of humanitarian governance. They allow the monitoring of crises from afar, making it possible to detect human rights violations and refugee movements, despite a crisis area being inaccessible. However, the political effects of such 'digital humanitarianism' are understudied. This article aims to amend this gap by analyzing which forms of seeing, showing, and governing refugee camps are ena…
Sub‐Saharan Africa: Towards better governance and sustainability
The countries of the Sub‐Saharan region have, on average, made significant progress in governance performance, especially in terms of democratic accountability and public goods provision—findings that seem to contradict patterns of state fragility and economic underdevelopment common in the region. This article explores this seeming contradiction and presents in more detail findings from the Berggruen Governance Index regarding the governance per…
Debunking the autocratic fallacy? Improving public goods delivery in Russia
Russia's invasion of Ukraine has not only deeply challenged Russia's international standing but has also endangered its fragile domestic order. Data from the 2022 Berggruen Governance Index reveals that overall state capacity has been stagnating at a fairly low level since the beginning of the millennium, while democratic accountability has been declining steadily and profoundly. In contrast, the provision of public goods has strongly increased d…
Political science (28 works) · Sociology (23 works) · Law (22 works) · Politics (21 works) · Political economy (19 works) · Law (13 works) · Economics (12 works) · Democracy (11 works) · Climate change (10 works) · Geography (9 works)