Citizens in Foreign Policy

  • Recasting the Role of Citizens in Foreign and Security Policy? A DFG-funded research project

    Democratic innovations and changing patterns of interaction between European executives and citizens

    DFG-funded research project (2022-2025)

    For the last decade, politicians and members of national executives in Europe have started to actively engage ordinary citizens in foreign and security policy (FSP), by initiating dialogue and participation processes. Our project investigates this change of the role of citizens in a policy field, usually considered as being dominated by the executive.

    More specifically, we have three objectives:

    1. We analyse and structure (change in) understandings of executive-citizens interactions in FSP as held by executives in Europe.
    2. We investigate if and how these understandings translate into interaction processes of democratic innovations, by which executives alter and possibly deepen citizens’ involvement in FSP.
    3. We assess the ramifications these practices may have for the politics in FSP, as well as how we could evaluate them normatively.

    We empirically map and theoretically conceptualise executive-citizens relations in FSP by comparing the cases of France, Germany, Poland, and the UK.

    A brief description of the project can be found here.

    This project is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) und runs from June 2022 to May 2025. It expands and deepens our pre-study of the German case, and it draws on preliminary research on democratic innovations in other European countries (funded by the internal funding line of the HSU).

  • Workshop “Democratic Innovations between Simulation and Transformation”

    Christian Opitz will participate in the workshop “Democratic Innovations between Simulation and Transformation” at Technical University of Darmstadt 15 and 16 February 2023. The workshop is jointly organised by the group Political Theory and Public Policy of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and the Chair of Political Theory and History of Ideas of the Technical University of Darmstadt. The full programme can be found here (only in German).

  • „Talk Social Science to Me“: Democracy and Foreign Policy

    Earlier this month, Hanna Pfeifer hosted an episode of the „Talk Social Science to Me“ podcast, a project by and about the Departments of Sociology and Political Science at Goethe University in Frankfurt. Hanna Pfeifer spoke with Gunther Hellmann, Professor at the Chair of Political Science and German/European Foreign Policy at Goethe University about the relation between democracy and foreign policy.

    The podcast episode, literature recommendations on the topic as well as other episodes in the „Talk Social Science to Me“ feed can be found here.

  • Democratic innovations and women in science

    Hanna Pfeifer was a guest for the first live edition of the Science She*roes Podcast, a podcast about women and non-binary people and their academic research and careers. The event took place at the Futurium in Berlin. Hanna Pfeifer and podcast hosts Christiane Attig und Rebecca Moltmann talked about the topic of „Wandel der Weltordnung? Demokratische Krisen und Innovationen“ – and about an academic career in conflict studies and IR as a woman in Germany. The whole episode can be found here.

    https://twitter.com/ScienceSheroes/status/1619644918020059136