IW

has been educated as an economist at the University of Mannheim/Germany. Later on he was teaching at the University of Bochum (Germany) and holding the Chair in 20th Century European History at the European University Institute, Florence/Italy. He was holding visiting fellowships in Oxford, Göttingen, Cologne, St. Louis, Sydney, Tokyo and Beijing. Since 1991 he was teaching economic history at the Faculty of History and Philosophy at the University of Bielefeld, where he is now Research Professor for the History of Social Science. In 2011 the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology appointed him to a member of its Independent Historical Commission. In this context he is co-editor and co-author of "Wirtschaftspolitik in Deutschland 1917-1990" (German economic policy 1917-1990), 4 vol., Berlin, Boston 2016.

His publications include books and articles on the history of European integration, economic history, and business history. His standard work on German economic history had several editions since 1983. A new edition has been published in 2011 (second Chinese edition 2019). Two of his books have been translated into English: The Dynamics of German Industry. Germany's Path toward the New Economy and the American Challenge, Berghahn Books: New York, Oxford 2005; also in Japanese: Tokyo University Press: Tokyo 2009; German Industry and Global Enterprise. BASF: The History of a Company, Cambridge University Press: New York, Oxford 2004.

is a senior researcher and scientific coordinator in the Research Training Group "World Politics" at the Faculty of Sociology, Bielefeld University. He accomplished his bi-national PhD in 2012 in Zacatecas and Bielefeld on the topic of migration and development nexus. After 2013, Mustafa has been involved in teaching and research at Bielefeld University. Currently, he is working on topics related to a global South perspective on migration and development, World Politics on migration, highly-skilled migration in Europe, social transformation in the global South and inequalities. He has written various academic publications in these fields as well as in related areas.

Recent publications:

• (with Pitkänen, P., Korpela, M., Schmidt, K., 2017): Characteristics of Temporary Migration in European-Asian Transnational Social Spaces, Springer.
• (with Pitkänen, P., Hayakawa, T., Schmidt, K., Rajan, S., 2019): Temporary Migration, Transformation and Development: Evidence from Europe and Asia, Routledge.
• (Forthcoming): Migration and Development in Latin America: a Global South Perspective. Routledge.

is a doctoral researcher in the project “Analogies between Comparisons as Mechanisms of “Departicularization”? On the Construction of Resonances between Colonial and Metropolitan Formations of Comparisons in National “Founding Debates” in the German Empire (1871-1918)” at the Collaborative Research Centre 1288 "Practices of comparing" at Bielefeld University. In her dissertation project, she focuses on missionary and social-scientific communities of practice that constructed analogies in order to implement a Protestant norm of religious subjectivity. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Political Science and History and a Master´s degree in Political Communication. Before joining the Collaborative Research Centre 1288, she worked as a campaign manager during the parliamentary and state elections and as a freelance author for “funk” (ZDF).

is Professor of Political Science at the Faculty of Sociology of Bielefeld University. He is currently also the speaker of the Research Training Group 'World Politics'. His current main research interests are the sociology and history of world politics and world society theory. Other major research fields are the politics of the polar regions and youth research.

Recent publications:

• (ed. with Tobias Werron): What in the World? Understanding Global Social Change. Bristol: Bristol University Press 2021.
• (ed. with Sandra Holtgrewe and Karlson Preuß) Envisioning the World: Mapping and Making the Global. Bielefeld: transcript 2021.
• (with Felix Maximilian Bathon) "Quantum and systems theory in world society: not brothers and sisters but relatives still?", Security Dialogue 51 (2020): online first: https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010619897874
• (with Kerrin Langer) "Die Geschichte des Streitkräftevergleichs in der internationalen Politik: Machtvergleiche und die Macht des Vergleichens", Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen 27 (2020).

is a researcher in the DFG research project "A Theory of World Entities" at the Faculty of Sociology of Bielefeld University. Her research interests include inter-organizational relations, global social policy and governance, and institutionalised forms of international cooperation. In her dissertation project she explores the International Labour Organization’s embeddedness in its inter-organizational environment. Iris holds a Bachelor’s degree (B.A.) in Political Science and Social Anthropology from the University of Göttingen and a Master’s degree (M.A.) in Professional Public Decision Making from the University of Bremen.

is a researcher in the DFG research project "'Making up people' in world society: analyzing the institutionalization of global social categories" at the institute of sociology of Tuebingen University. From the perspective of the sociology of categorization, comparison, and quantification, her research focuses on processes of global boundary making in the fields of disability, gender, and ethnicity.

Recent publications:

• (with Martin Bühler, Sophia Cramer, Andrea Glauser, 2020): Global beobachten und vergleichen. Soziologische Analysen zur Weltgesellschaft, Campus.
• (with Marion Müller, 2018): "Making up people" globally. Die Institutionalisierung globaler Personenkategorien am Beispiel Indigener Völker und Menschen mit Behinderungen, in: Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 47:5, 306-331.
• (2017): Die Einheit der Vielfalt. Zur Institutionalisierung der globalen Kategorie "indigene Völker", Campus.

is a postdoctoral researcher at the working group of Alexandra Kaasch (German and transnational social policy). His work is located at the intersection of social policy, International Relations and political sociology. He is particularly interested in the role of international organisations in (global) social policy, social policy in the Global South, and the role of knowledge and ideas in policy-making. Recent publications attend to the influence of quantification and future visions in global politics. His research has been published in Policy & Society, Global Society, Historical Social Research, the International Journal of Social Welfare, and in edited volumes on knowledge and expertise in (global) politics.

His research brings together perspectives from sociology and political science in the field of international relations. For a long time he has been interested in theories and methods in peace and conflict studies. Currently, he is working on conflicts between global, national and local orders in world society. In particular he is studying the role of discourses and practices of security in internationalized statebuilding. Furthermore he is interested in postcolonial and postwar political conflicts, in the role of victims in transitional justice as well as in sexual and reproductive rights as a global field of conflict. Methodologically, he is using theory driven and comparative research designs with an emphasis on Central and Southeast Asia (Cambodia and Timor Leste). Current research projects also referring to cases like Cameroon, Papua New Guinea, Kenya and Ethiopia.

Recent publications:

• (with Zimmer, K., 2019): The Localization of Sexual Rights in Ukraine, in: Radzhana Buyantueva & Maryna Shevtsova (Eds.): LBTQ+ Activism in Centralk and Eastern Europe, Cham: Palgrave, 153-184.
• (2019): Security Practices and the Production of Center-Periphery-Figurations in Statebuilding, in: Alternatives, online first: https://doi.org/10.1177/0304375418821479
• (with Distler, W. & Ketzmerick, M., 2018): Securitisation and Desecuritisation of Violence in Trusteeship Statebuilding, in: Civil Wars, online first: https://doi.org/10.1080/13698249.2018.1525675
• (2018): The Militarization of Security. A Systems Theory Perspective, in: Critical Military Studies, online first: DOI:10.1080/23337486.2018.1505383

is sociologist and lawyer. Since 1999, he has been holding a chair in sociology at Bielefeld University. His interests are sociology of law, theory of regulation, sociological theory, and qualitative methods. He was a member of the German Ethics Council (appointed by the Federal Parliament and Government) from 2008 until 2012. Since 2010, he has been acting as deputy director of the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology (BGHS, funded by the German »Excellence Initiative«). From 2008 until 2012, he was executive editor of the Zeitschrift für Soziologie. Since 2000, he has been working as one of the editors of Zeitschrift für Rechtssoziologie – The German Journal of Law and Society.

is a researcher at the Research Training Group 'World Politics' at Bielefeld University. His doctoral project in 2017-2020 explores networks related to prevention agenda of the UN Human Rights Council. Alongside with diplomas from the College of Europe in Bruges and Saint Petersburg State University, Anatoly received professional diplomatic training at MGIMO-University. As a former specialist at the Centre for Expertise, Centre for Sociological and Internet Research in Saint Petersburg, he applies social network analysis to international organizations. Anatoly publications cover thematic areas related to human rights, international courts and tribunals, EU external action at international organizations, interrelation between security, human rights and development pillars of the United Nations.

Recent publications:

• (2019): Coherence of European Union Actions at the UN Human Rights Council and the Council of Europe. MGIMO Review of International Relations (3): 159-175. DOI: 10.24833/2071-8160-2019-3-66-159-175
• (2019): The Potential of the Union State of Russia and Belarus in the UN System. Contemporary Europe (1): 138-147. DOI: 10.15211/soveurope12019138147
• (2019): Implementation of the Treaty of the Union State and Multipolar World Order. In: Dostanko, E., Baichorau, A., Kizima, S. (Eds.): Greater Eurasia: Challenges and Opportunities. Minsk: Belarusian State University: 11-17.
• (with Kuteynikov, A., 2018): Migrant's Rights At A System Of The European Convention On Human Rights. European Proceedings of Social and Behavioural Sciences (38): 89-96. DOI: 10.15405/epsbs.2018.04.11
• (2018): Prevention of Extremism in Multipolar World and Role of Union State. Social Sciences and National Security (4): 61-64.
• (2018): Union State at the UN System. From Human Rights to Human Dignity. In: Syturin, V. (Ed.) Awardees of the Research Contest among Young Experts of Union State of Belarus and Russia. Moscow: GAUGN-Press: 62-81.

is a doctoral researcher in sociology at Bielefeld University. From 2010 till 2013 he was a member of the Graduate School “World Society – Making and Representing the Global”. His main research concerns Global Social Policy and welfare state development in Eastern Europe. In his PhD thesis he focuses on East European non-EU members and goes into the question, whether Russia, Ukraine and Belarus are variations of the European welfare state model. In addition he is interested in cultural history of football. Martin Brand holds a diploma in political science from Free University Berlin.

is a Research Associate in the DFG-funded project "Worldviews of Ice: Constructions of the Arctic at the Science/Politics Interface". His research interests include international relations and security, science cooperation, and geopolitics in the Arctic. In his dissertation project, he focuses on the development of funding priorities in Arctic science and the consultation processes between science and politics. Mikko holds a Master of Arts in Social Science (Baltic Sea Region Studies) from the University of Tartu and a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the Friedrich-Schiller-University of Jena.

Lothar Brock is senior professor of Political Science at Goethe University Frankfurt and guest researcher at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt. Together with Mathias Albert and Klaus-Dieter Wolf he was a co-founder of the World Society Research Group in Frankfurt and Darmstadt. His research interests include the constitutionalization of international law, just peace, and the international protection of ‘civilians’ against mass atrocities in intra-state conflict.

Recent publications:

• (with Simon, Hendrik (Eds.)): The Justification of War and International Order. Past and Present, Oxford: Oxford University Press i.E.
• (with Jäger, Sarah (Eds.), 2020): Frieden durch Recht – Anfragen an das liberale Modell, Wiesbaden: Springer VS. https://Doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-28747-4
• (2019): Between Sovereign Judgement and the International Rule of Law. The Protection of People from Mass Atrocities, in: Mathias Albert/Anthony Lang Jr., (Eds.), The Politics of International Political Theory: Reflections on the Works of Chris Brown, Houndmills: Palgrave, 87-116. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93278-1
• (2018): Die Ordnung der Weltgesellschaft. Zwischen Staatenanarchie und Weltstaatlichkeit, in: Albert, Mathias/Deitelhoff, Nicole/Hellmann, Gunther (Eds.): Ordnung und Regieren in der Weltgesellschaft. Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 23-56.
• (with Simon, Hendrik, 2018): Die Selbstbehauptung und Selbstgefährdung des Friedens als Herrschaft des Rechts. Eine endlose Karussellfahrt?, in: Politische Vierteljahresschrift,  59:2, S. 269–291, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11615-018-0066-z

is an sociologist who works at the intersections of global and transnational studies, cultural sociology, and theory. She also has interests in comparative-historical sociology, the sociology of markets, and the sociology of intellectuals/knowledge. Holding four graduate degrees (three master’s degrees and a Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia University), Buchholz currently is an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University’s School of Communication and Sociology Department, a faculty fellow at the Critical Realism Network Yale University, and an editorial board member of Sociological Theory. Prior to that, she was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, the first woman elected from her discipline.

Recent publications:

• (2022). The Global Rules of Art. The Emergence and Divisions of a Cultural World Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• (2019). Real Type Formation in Global Comparative Work. Perspectives 41, no. 1 (Spring/Summer): 14–18.
• (2018). Rethinking the Center-Periphery Model: Dimensions and Temporalities of Macro-Structure in a Global Cultural Field. Poetics: Journal of Empirical Research on Culture, the Media, and the Arts 71 (December): 18–32.
• (2016). What is a Global Field? Theorizing Fields beyond the Nation-State, The Sociological Review 64 (2): 31–60. https://doi.org/10.1111/2059-7932.12001

is Senior Research Fellow and Lecturer in International Politics and Conflict Studies at the Institute of Political Science, Bundeswehr University Munich, Germany. He is a member of the Arab German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Science (BBAW). He is also co-director of the Israeli-European Policy Network. In May 2016 Jan Busse obtained his PhD degree (with highest distinction, summa cum laude) at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Public Affairs of the Bundeswehr University Munich. He received a master's degree in Global Politics from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and his bachelor's degree in Political Science from the University of Bielefeld. From 2010 until 2014, Jan Busse worked at the Middle East and Africa Division of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik) in Berlin. In 2009 he was a trainee in the cabinet of the president of the European Commission José Manuel Barroso in Brussels working on EU foreign policy. His research focuses on global historical sociologies of political order, the Israeli-Arab conflict, political dynamics in the Middle East and North Africa, and EU-Mediterranean Relations. He has published in peer-reviewed journals such as International Political Sociology and Middle East Critique, and Global Affairs.

Recent publications:

• (2021): The Globality of Governmentality: Governing an Entangled World (The New International Relations Series). London: Routledge (in press).
• (2021): The Historical and Social Embeddedness of the Post-Ottoman Space in World Society, in: Paul Kohlenberg / Nadine Godehardt (ed.), The Multidimensionality of Regions in World Politics. London: Routledge, 75-93.
• (2020) [2018]: Deconstructing the Dynamics of World-Societal Order: The Power of Governmentality in Palestine. (The New International Relations Series). London: Routledge (Paperback-Edition).

sociologist, is a research assistant at the University of Hildesheim and a PhD candidate at the University of Giessen. His research focuses on litigation practices, legal transformations and conflicts of social inequality. He works on sociological theories of law and legal mobilization with an international comparative focus on education and environmental litigation in Latin America.

Recent publications:

• with Carlos Andrés García Carvajal and Juliette Vargas Trujillo (2021). Wo kein Kläger (-kollektiv), da kein Richter? Abkürzungen und Umwege kollektiver Rechtsmobilisierungen in der kolumbianischen Amazonas-und Atratoregion. Zeitschrift für Kultur-und Kollektivwissenschaft, 7(1): 83-116.
• (2021): Conocimientos, prácticas y representaciones institucionales: La caja negra de la justicia penal para adolescentes colombianos:(Knowledge, practices and institutional representations: The black box of the juvenile justice in Colombia). Oñati Socio-Legal Series, 11(3): 907-929.

Benjamin Davy was professor of land policy, land management, and municipal geoinformation at the School of Spatial Planning, TU Dortmund university (1997-2019). From 2010 through 2016, he was Vice President and President of the International Academic Association on Planning, Law, and Property Rights (PLPR). From 2017 through 2021, he was Vice President and President of the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP). Currently, Ben Davy is Visiting Professor at the University of Johannesburg School of Law (South Africa). He is Essay Editor of »Planning Theory« (since 2011) and member of the editorial boards of »Planning Theory & Practice« (since 2007) and »Journal of the American Planning Association« (since 2015). His current research deals with social distancing and the COVID-19 crisis, human dignity, and the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Recent publications:

• (2020): »Dehumanized housing« and the ideology of property as a social function. Planning Theory 19 (1), 38-58.
• (2019): Evil insurgency. Planning Theory and Practice 20 (2), 290-297.
• (2018): Thoughts on internationalism and planning. Town Planning Review 89 (4), 323-329.
• (co-edit with Sony Pellissery and Harvey M. Jacobs, 2017): Land policies in India. Pro­mises, practices and challenges, Springer Nature.

Ulrike Davy is professor for constitutional and administrative law, German and international social law, and comparative law at the Faculty of Law of Bielefeld University. Additionally, she is Principal Investigator under the DFG-funded Collaborative Research Center 1288 Practices of Comparing, Principal Investigator under the DFG-funded Research Training Group World Politics, and member of the University Council of Bielefeld University. Her research concentrates on migration and refugee law, history and theory of the welfare state, European and global social policy, and universal human rights law, in particular, social rights and the right to equality.

Recent publications:

• (2020): Sozialpolitik der Union, in: Matthias Niedobitek (Hg.), Europarecht. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1447-1568.
• (2019): Refugee Crisis in Germany and the Right to a Subsistence Minimum: Differences That Ought Not Be, Georgia Journal of International and Comparative Law, Vol. 47, 2, 367-450.
• (2019): Wenn Gleichheit in Gefahr ist. Staatliche Schutzpflichten und Schutzbedürftigkeit am Beispiel des Minderheitenschutzes und des Schutzes vor rassischer Diskriminierung, ZÖR 74, 4: 773-844.

• (with Leese, Matthias, 2021): Criminal Futures: Predictive Policing and Everyday Police Work. London: Routledge.
• (with Heimstädt, Maximilian and Elena Esposito, 2020): A Pandemic of Prediction: On the Circulation of Contagion Models between Public Health and Public Safety. In: Sociologica – International Journal for Sociological Debate 14 (3): Art. #11470, 1-24.
• (with Krasmann, Susanne, 2020): Predictive Policing: not yet, but soon preemptive? In: Policing and Society 30 (8): 905-919.

is a doctoral researcher in sociology at Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology (BGHS) and a research associate of the project „The discursive construction of conflict and international organizational decision-making processes between normative frameworks of peacebuilding and securitization - the case of the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI)", funded by the German Foundation for Peace Research. Her research presently focuses on the sociology of international relations, international organisations, critical security studies, knowledge sociology and discourse theory.

Current projects include research on knowledge and discursive frames of the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) (PhD project), an article on UN interventions from a world society perspective (forthcoming in 2014, co-authored with Mitja Sienknecth and Mathias Albert) as well as research and evaluation work on UN SC Resolutions 1325 and 1820, women's participation and the prevention of violence against women. A sociologist by training, Kerstin has worked as a conflict prevention and recovery practitioner with the UN's Development Programme from 2003 to 2009 (Switzerland, Nepal, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, South-East Europe & CIS).

is professor of modern history, vice-speaker of the BMBF-project „Entangled Americas“, and member of the steering committee of the cooperation group „communication of comparisons“ at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF). Since 2010 she has been dean/vice dean of the faculty of history, philosophy, and theology. Her research interests include the history of global entanglements, global microhistory and locality studies, gender history, comparative history of historiography, and the communication of comparisons in history.

Recent publications:

• Globale Machtverhältnisse, lokale Verflechtungen: Die Berliner Kongokonferenz, Solingen und das Hinterland des kolonialen Waffenhandels, in: Christof Dejung, Martin Lengwiler (Hg.), Ränder der Moderne, Köln, Weimar, Wien 2014.
• The Vertigo of Historical Analyses in a Globalizing World. Reading Joan Scott, in: History and Theory 53 (May 2014), S. 235-244.
• Lokalität und die Dimensionen des Globalen. Eine Frage der Relationen, in: Historische Anthropologie, 21.Jg. 2013/1, S. 4-25.
• Global- und Geschlechtergeschichte. Eine Beziehung mit großer Zukunft, in: L'Homme. Zeitschrift für feministische Geschichtswissenschaft, 23. Jg. Heft 2, 2012, S. 87-100.

is a doctoral researcher at the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology (BGHS). Her dissertation explores the development of long-term care policies in Turkey in a comparative perspective. Since 2017 she has been working in the research project "How ´social´ is Turkey? Turkey´s social security system in a European context" as a research assistant at Bielefeld University. Erdogan received her B.A in Sociology from Koc University, Istanbul and her M.A. in Sociology from Bielefeld University.

Recent co-authored publications:

• Öktem, K. and Erdogan, C. (2019), "Between welfare state and (state-organised) charity", International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJSSP-11-2018-0217

emeritus Professor of Development Planning and former Dean of the Faculty of Sociology, University of Bielefeld is one of the founding directors of the Institute for the Study of World Society. He is now Senior Fellow, Center for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn and Eminent Visiting Professor, Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam. After finishing his postgraduate education in sociology, economics and geography at the University of Freiburg, Germany, he taught sociology at the Mannheim School of Economics, Monash University, at Yale University, where he was also Director of Graduate Southeast Asia Studies, University of Singapore (Head of Dept.) before joining Bielefeld University as the Chairman of the Sociology of Development Research Centre. He also served as Visiting Professor at the Singapore Management University, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Universitas Gajah Mada, the EHESS (Paris), Trinity College (Oxford), the University of Hawaii, and as Distinguished Visiting Professor at the National University of Singapore. His current research is concerned with the governance of global maritime space, the South China Sea and knowledge governance.

(PhD, New School for Social Research) is Professor of Transnational, Migration and Development Sociology in the Department of Sociology at Bielefeld University. He also directs the Center on Migration, Citizenship and Development (COMCAD). Professor Faist has contributed to ongoing debates about transnationality, citizenship, and social policy in Europe and beyond. He has authored and co-authored numerous books including "The Transnationalized Social Question: Migration and the Politics of Social Inequalities in the Twenty-First Century" (2019), "Disentangling Migration and Climate Change" (2016), "Transnational Migration" (2013), as well as "Citizenship: Discourse, Theory and Transnational Prospects" (2007) and "Dual Citizenship in Europe" (2007).

(Dr. phil.) was a research associate at the Research Group ‘Transnationalization, Development and Migration', Bielefeld University. She was a member and coordinator of the C1 project within the Collaborative Research Centre 882. Her projects dealed with social inequalities in transnational perspective, global mobility, sociology of citizenship and the transformations of locality. Publications include "Transnational Migration" (Polity Press, 2013, co-author) and "Migrants and Cities" (Ashgate, 2012).

is Professor of Political Theory and History of Political Thought. His main research fields are: Philosophy and Theory of Modernity, Philosophy and Theory of Social Sciences, Theories of the Political, Democratic Theory, Contemporary French Philosophy and Social Theory, and Post-Marxist Critical Social Theory. Among his most recently published books are: "Radikale Demokratietheorien zur Einführung" (2020), "Radikale Demokratietheorie. Ein Handbuch" (2019, co-editor with D. Comtesse, F. Martinsen, and M. Nonhoff), "Pierre Rosanvallon's Political Thought" (co-editor with F. Martinsen, S. Sawyer, and D. Schulz).

is a postdoctoral researcher at the Collaborative Research Centre "From Heterogeneity to Inequality" (SFB 882) in the project "Conceptions of Global Inequality in World Society". Her main research interests are international relations theory, international organisations and discourse theory. Current research projects deal with the semantics of global inequality (postdoc project), inequality as and international organisations and the myth of global civil society participation.

is a doctoral researcher at the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology (BGHS) and a member of the Research Training Group "World Politics". After his studies in International Relations (Political Science) he has worked as a lecturer (seminars) at the University of Amsterdam and Leiden University. His PhD project focuses on the changing human security norm entrepreneurship strategies of Western small states and middle powers at the United Nations. Among his general research interests are constructivism, international norms, human security norms, small state and middle power foreign policy, and questions regarding the reordering of the current world order.

studied French Cultural Studies and Intercultural Communication, Political Science, Economics, Sustainability Studies, and International Relations with the focus on Global Political Economy at the Universities of Saarbrücken, Trier, Dresden and Bordeaux. She is currently a research associate in the SFB 1288 "Practices of comparing" and a doctoral researcher at Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology, Bielefeld University. In her PhD project, she analyses the link between the international economic order and the security system through power comparison. Her research interests include globalization, power analysis as well as global political economy.

is professor for Public Law, Political Theory and Constitutional History at the Faculty of Laws at Bielefeld University. He is a member of the Collaborative Research Centre 882 “From Heterogeneities to Inequalities” and was am member of the former Collaborative Research Center 584 "The Political as a space of communication in History". His special fields of interests are modern Constitutional History of the 20th Century, Human Rights Research, Security and Safety and its legal protection as well as the laws of Integration (of foreigners) in German and the EU.

is a doctoral researcher at the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology (BGHS) at the Faculty of Sociology at Bielefeld University. His dissertation project focuses on old age protection, retirement and pension policies in Iran. His research interests include social policy, the history of work and workers, welfare, inequality and informality. He has recently published a book "Piri" (2019) an ethnographic study of older people in Tehran (in Persian). In 2016 he also published an article "Gender in a Justice-Centered Society: A Review of Abu-Hamid Ghazel's Ethical Views" (in Persian).

is a doctoral researcher in the Research Training Group "World Politics" at Bielefeld University. His research project focuses on the global rise, transformation, and consolidation of conceptions of informal empire in the course of the 20th century. It investigates how informal empire has been semantically constructed and described as an illegitimate although very common structural feature of world politics. Simon Hecke studied sociology and history at the Universities of Bielefeld and Warwick. Before joining the Research Training Group, he worked as a research associate at the Forum Internationale Wissenschaft in Bonn and the Faculty of Sociology at Bielefeld University. His research interests include sociological theory, historical sociology, sociology of empires as well as globalization and world society studies.

is Seniorprofessor at the Goethe University Frankfurt/Main. From 2002 to 2019 he was Professor for Economic Sociology and Social Science Education at the Faculty of Sociology of Bielefeld University. His research concentrates on the theory of social science education, political participation and education, economics of convention, especially conventionalist approaches to market theory and concepts of social science education.

Recent publications:

• (2019): Wirtschaftssoziologie. Konstanz: UVK/UTB, 2. Aufl.
• (2019): The social science principle in socio-economic didactics. In: International Journal of Pluralism and Economic Education 10 (4), 350-368.
• (with Andrea Szukala and Claude Proeschel, 2019): Situation versus Komparation? Eine Skizze zur konventionentheoretischen Methodologie am Beispiel Bürgerschaftsbildung in der Schule. In: Imdorf, Christian; Leemann, Regula; Gonon, Philipp (eds.): Bildung und Konventionen. Wiesbaden, 281-307.

is a post-doc researcher at the Hamburg Institut for Social Research (HIS) where he is a member of the Research Group Macro-Violence. He is an organizational sociologist by training and focuses mainly on situated action. Currently, he works on local temporalities of violence and on how to explain puzzling social facts from a processual point of view. Recent publications are: Theorizing Violence. Über die Indexikalität von Gewalt und ihrer soziolo-gischen Analyse (together with Teresa Koloma Beck), Zeitschrift für Theoretische Soziolo-gie 8 (1), 2019; Gewalt erklären. Plädoyer für eine entdeckende Prozesssoziologie (together with Wolfgang Knöbl), Hamburg: Hamburger Edition 2019; Die Schweigsamkeit der Gewalt (together with Eddie Hartmann), WestEnd. Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 17 (1), 2020.

is Scientific Researcher at the Institute for Social Sciences/Department Sociology at the University of Koblenz-Landau (on Landau Campus). He is a member of the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Lucerne (GSL) in Switzerland, and is writing his hermeneutic-sociological doctoral thesis on the visual construction of globality. Furthermore, he teaches as guest lecturer at the Universities of Hannover and Lucerne.

is Research Associate in the DFG-funded project "Worldviews of Ice: Constructions of the Arctic at the Science/Politics Interface". She is interested in science cooperation and geopolitics in the Arctic, with a focus on critical geopolitics, science diplomacy and sociology of science. In her current research, she investigates the different knowledge systems, worldviews and imaginaries in Arctic scientific communities. Svenja holds a Master's degree in "Governing Sustainability" from the University of Applied Science in Bremen and a Bachelor's degree in Social Science from the Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf.

is Professor of Political Sociology at Bielefeld University. He earned his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and Political Science and has subsequently worked at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich and the University of Lucerne. His current research interests include political and economic sociology, social networks and globalization. Recent publications in these fields include the book Moralizing the Corporation (E. Elgar, 2010) and chapters in The Political Role of Corporate Citizens (ed. by K. S. Helgesson and U. Mörth, Palgrave 2013), in Netzwerke in der funktional differenzierten Gesellschaft (ed. by M. Bommes and V. Tacke, VS 2011) and, with G. Mutz, in Globalisierung Süd (ed. by A. Paul, A. Pelfini and B. Rehbein, VS 2010). He is currently preparing the edited volume From Globalization to World Society (co-ed. with F. Kastner and T. Werron, Routledge 2014), which focuses on neo-institutional and systems approaches to globalization.

is a research associate in a DFG-funded project on the "Social Constructions of Climate Futures" and doctoral student in the sociology of science section at the University of Hamburg. He works on a historical sociology of the scientific discourse on climate and climate futures. His research interests include sociological theory, sociology of time and world society theory.

is a doctoral researcher in the Researcher Training Group "World Politics", Bielefeld University. Her doctoral project focuses on the cooperation among inter- and non-governmental organizations in the sphere of early warning and response to violent conflicts. Alina received her Specialist degree in International Relations from the Kyrgyz-Russian Slavic University in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan and her Master's degree in International Economic and Political Studies from the Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. Apart from gaining work experience at the several donor-funded projects, Alina spent more than 5 years teaching at the Faculty of International Relations, Kyrgyz National University. Her main research interests include international politics and international organizations, conflict prevention, social integration, refugee and migration studies.

Recent Publication:

• (2018). Integration policy in the European Union: From Multiculturalism towards Social Integration of Migrants. Lessons for the CIS countries. Post-Soviet studies, Moscow, vol. 1, no.6, pp. 556-566 (in Russian).

is (em.) Professor for Political Communication at the Faculty of Sociology of Bielefeld University. He works on risk issues, social movements and systems theory.

Recent Publication:

• "Puritanischer Terror", Soziale Systeme 2016 (bibl. 2018), 21(1): 42-78.

is Professor in German and Transnational Social Policy at the Faculty of Sociology (Bielefeld University). Her research interests are in the fields of comparative and global social and health policy and governance. She is lead editor of the journal "Global Social Policy" (SAGE), and co-editor of the international book series "Research in Comparative and Global Social Policy" (Policy Press). Among her publications are "The Architecture of Arguments in Global Social Governance" (2021), "Actors and Agency in Global Social Governance" (2015) and "Shaping Global Health Policy"  (2015).

is Junior Professor of Transnational History of the Americas and Ex­ecutive Director of the Center for InterAmerican Studies at Bielefeld University. His research areas include Latin American and Transnational History, Inter-American Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Indigeneity and Identity Politics, Social Movements. He has done field and archival Work in Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia, Mexico and the US. He has recently published "Politische Räume jenseits von Staat und Nation" (2012), "Selling EthniCity: Urban Cultural Politics in the Americas" (2011), "Transnational Americas. Envisioning Inter.American Area Studies in Globalization Processes" (2013), and "En diálogo: Metodologías horizontales en ciencias sociales y culturales" (with Sarah Corona Berkin, 2012).

Fatima Kastner is professor for Theories of Globalization and Digital Transformation at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, Germany. Having studied law, philosophy, and social sciences at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and the Collège International de Philosophie (CIPh) in Paris, she holds a Master and a Doctoral degree from the Goethe-University of Frankfurt/Main as well as a Habilitation from Bielefeld University. Fatima Kastner received several prizes, research grants and scholarships from the Hessian Academic Scholarship Foundation, the German Research Organization (DFG) and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). Quite recently she was awarded the Adam Podgorecki Prize by the Research Committee on Sociology of Law (RCSL) of the International Sociological Association (ISA) in the category “outstanding achievements in socio-legal research”.

Her current research interests include Theories of Globalization, Sociology of Law and Global Constitutionalism, Theory of World Society and World Culture, Transitional Justice and Human Rights, Digital Society and Robot Law.

Her publications include:

• Haben Roboter Rechte? Konstruktionen von Individualität und Personalität in der digitalen Gesellschaft. In: Eric Hilgendorf und Benno Zabel (Hrsg.), Die Idee subjektiver Rechte. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2019 (in print).
• Academia in Transformation. Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlag 2018 (conjointly with Sarhan Dhouib, Florian Kohstall and Carola Richter).
• Soziologie der Menschenrechte: Zur Universalisierung von Unrechtserfahrungen in der Weltgesellschaft. In: Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie, Jg. 42, Heft 3. Wiesbaden: Springer Verlag 2017, pp. 217-236.
• Transitional Justice in der Weltgesellschaft. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition 2015.
• From Globalization to World Society. Neo-Institutional and Systems-Theoretical Perspectives. New York: Routledge 2015 (conjointly with Boris Holzer and Tobias Werron).
• Niklas Luhmann. Law as a Social System. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2008 (conjointly with Richard Nobles, David Schiff and Rosamund Ziegert).

is research associate at the chair for European Studies. Working at the nexus of International Relations (IR) and International Political Theory (IPT), his current research is concerned with a discourse-theoretical investigation of academic discourses on the EU as a subject in world politics. His further interests lie in security and identity studies, sociology of science, and conspiracy narratives in times of epistemic crisis.

is lecturer at the Department of Sociology at the University of Lucerne (Switzerland). His research interests include sociology of organizations; sociology of risk and regulation and sociological theory. Currently he is working on the Demographic Change as a challenge for organizations.

Martin Koch is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Bielefeld University. His research interests include international organizations, international relations theory and world society studies. He is currently working on the role of G20 in world politics, on inter-organizational relations and world order and on the IOM as a world organization. His recent publications are "Internationale Organisationen in der Weltgesellschaft" (2017) [International Organizations in World Society], "World Organizations in Migration Politics" (2018, with M. Geiger), and "Twitter-Diplomacy" (2020, with J. Siri, F. Zimmermann, M. Myatt, and T. Jaschkowitz).

is a (retired) extraordinary professor (apl. Professor) for sociological theory, history of sociology and historical sociology at the Faculty of Sociology, Bielefeld University. Formerly, he has done research on the history and methodology of German historical sociology. Today he focuses on the theoretical problem of how total wars (like World War I and II) determine social change in modern society. Combining sociological theory and historical research, he aims at integrating total wars into a theory of modern society which has up until now considered modern society as civil society.

is research associate in the DFG research project “The Concept of Sovereignty in the Transnational Constellation: A Reconfiguration of Political Normativity“ at the Department of Political Science at University of Trier. Her research interests include Theory and History of international relations; Knowledge Practice and Discourse Analysis; as well as Global Governance, Transnational Relations and the Transformation of Sovereign States’ Relations. Friederike Kuntz is currently working on her PhD thesis in which she focuses on the historical emergence of knowledge about the international and its implication for the sovereign states’ relation in historical-comparative perspective.

is postdoctoral research fellow at the Faculty of Sociology, Bielefeld University, Germany. He was JSPS Fellow at the Institute of Global Studies, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies after receiving his Ph.D. in international relations from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. His research interests include labor politics and social movements, inequality and capitalism, politics and security in China, East Asia, and the Pacific. He has published in journals such as Journal of Contemporary Asia, International Sociology, Socialism and Democracy, and Journal of Labor and Society. He is the author of "Chinese Politics and Labor Movements" (2019).

is Professor for Sociology/Sociological Theory at the Carl von Ossietzky University in Oldenburg (Oldb), Germany. Her research interests are social theory and theory of society. One of her major concerns is to analyze human life and human dignity/freedom as foundational institutions of modern societies.

is lecturer at the Institute for Sociology at RWTH Aachen University. Her research interests include global inequality, development, sociology of time and quantification. In 2012, she completed her PhD thesis "The meaning of affluence. Niklas Luhmann, Talcott Parsons and Pierre Bourdieu on global inequalities". Her current research focuses on development indicators. It investigates how these numerical policy tools relate to time – for example, how they symbolically refer to past, present and future, and how they articulate with processes of social change. Recent publications include: "Soziale Ordnungsbildung durch Kollektivität: Luhmanns "Ebenenunterscheidung" und die moderne Weltgesellschaft. In: Interaktion – Organisation – Gesellschaft. Sonderband der Zeitschrift für Soziologie (Hrsg. Bettina Heintz und Hartmann Tyrell), Stuttgart: Lucius & Lucius 2014 (in press)." "Talcott Parsons: A Sociological Theory of Action Systems. In: Darrell Arnold (Hrsg.), Traditions of Systems Theory: Major Figures and Developments, London/New York: Routledge, 2013."

studied sociology and political science in Duisburg-Essen, Bielefeld and St. Petersburg. He is currently a doctoral researcher at Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology, Bielefeld University. In his PhD project, he analyzes how interaction-like structures enable transnational connections of social movements. His research interests include globalization, interaction, social movements as well as ethnography and social theory.

is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Faculty of Sociology, Bielefeld University, Germany. She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Edinburgh in 2020. Her research interests include migration and work, ethnicity and gender, emotion and intimacy, and the politics of care. Currently, she is working on the ERC-funded project 'WelfareStruggles' which comparatively explores the logic of welfare provisions for migrant workers in global factories in China and Vietnam. She is also working on a monograph based on her PhD thesis (under contract with Bristol University Press), which explores the intertwining inequalities of ethnicity, rural-urban divide, and gender in contemporary China by looking at the work and migration experiences of ethnic performers in Southwest China.

received his PhD degree in 2017 at Bielefeld University. He worked as researcher at Bielefeld University and at TU Dresden. His dissertation thesis debates the shaping and engineering of modern consumer subjectivities in China. His research interests revolve around the legacies of colonial discourse in contemporary governmentality regimes, with a special focus on how ideas of “backwardness” are used to legitimize and propel the engineering of “modern” subjects. His fields of expertise are postcolonial theory and governmentality, with a thematic focus on governmentality of consumption and family life.

Recent publications:

• (2018): Shopping in China. Dispositive konsumistischer Subjektivation im Alltagsleben chinesischer Studierender. Wiesbaden: Springer.
• (2021): Die Kolonialität der Moderne: Koloniale Zeitlichkeit und die Internalisierung der Idee der 'Rückständigkeit' in China. In: Zeitschrift für Soziologie 50 (1): 26-41.
• (2018): Contesting Chinese Modernity? Postcoloniality and Discourses on Modernisation at a Chinese University Campus. In: Postcolonial Studies 24 (4): 469-484.
• (2017): Colonial Temporality and Chinese National Modernization Discourses. In: Interdisciplines 8 (1): 51-80.

is professor of economic sociology and the sociology of work at Bielefeld University's Faculty of Sociology. Previously, she was professor of sociology at the Economics Department of the University of Klagenfurt, Austria. Her current research focuses on economic globalization and on transnationally mobile work. The processes and problems of transcending (political and cultural) boundaries in the economic realm are at the centre of her research interests. As a member of the Institute of World Society Studies (IW), she is also interested in world society theory and the world society-specific social structures ("Eigenstrukturen von Weltgesellschaft", vgl. Stichweh 2001), like global/transnational labour markets.

Recent publications:

• (2020): Introduction to the special theme: theorizing transnational labour markets, Global Networks: glob.12284, online first: doi.org/10.1111/glob.12284
• (2020): Interest representation in transnational labour markets: Campaigning as an alternative to traditional union action?, Journal of Industrial Relations 62(2): 185-209.
• (2019): Theorizing transnational labour markets. A research heuristic based on the new economic sociology, Global Networks: glob.12260, online first: doi.org/10.1111/glob.12260
• (2018): Eastern European Service Contract Workers in the German Meat Industry. A Case Study in Market Making of a Transnational Labour Market, ZiF-Mitteilungen 2018(2): 23-31.
• (with Spiegel, A. and Bredenkötter, B.,2018): Expatriate Managers: The Paradoxes of Working and Living Abroad, Routledge studies in international business and the world economy; 70, New York, London: Routledge.

studied sociology and political science at the Goethe University Frankfurt. After having worked as project coordinator of "LitKom" (Strengthening Literal Competences) at Bielefeld University, he is currently a doctoral researcher at the Research Training Group "World Politics". His dissertation explores social-scientific diagnoses of the present as a comparative mode of observation that is specific to world society. Those 'world diagnoses' are reconstructed as products of discourse located in the field of tension between science and public intervention. His research interests include sociological theory, sociology of public intellectuals and the history of ideas in the social sciences.

Recent publication:

• (2019): Intellektuelle Krisenbewältigungspraxis in der Nachkriegsgesellschaft. Die epistemische Produktivität der "Krise" in Reinhart Kosellecks Studien zur Krise der Moderne, in: Gostmann, P. and A. Ivanova (eds.). Soziologie des Geistes. Grundlagen und Fallstudien zur Ideengeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts. Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 237-332.

is a researcher at Bielefeld University in the DFG-funded project "Zur Institutionalisierung der Rankings. Diskurskarrieren tabellarischer Leistungsvergleiche 1850-1980". Before she was a doctoral researcher at the graduate school "Innovation Society Today" at TU Berlin. Her PhD focuses on governmentality and subjectivation in vocational orientation. Her research interests include political theory ? especially poststructuralist theory, discourse theory and governmentality studies ?, discourse analysis, subjectivation analysis and historical sociology. In her current research she focuses on the discursive institutionalization of rankings in competitive sports in the 19th and 20th century.

(MA, University of Bielefeld) is presently a lecturer at the Department of Sociology at the University of Lucerne (Switzerland). She is completing her PhD at the Institute for World Society Studies at the University of Bielefeld (Germany). Her research interests include organizational sociology and technology studies, in particular the case of business software as a pattern of globalization.

is a postdoctoral researcher in the Collaborative Research Centre 1288 "Practices of Comparing" at Bielefeld University. His research centres on two main themes. The first is the quantification of world politics and the politics of comparison that this quantification generates. He is especially interested in the evolution of the field of actors that has produced, disseminated and politically mobilised comparative knowledge on military expenditures, capabilities and power since the Second World War. The second theme is the evolution and intersection of hierarchies in world politics. The interplay between the stratification and the governance of international society is an example for an intersection of social and political hierarchies in world politics. In his PhD thesis, he reconstructed the history of great powers and their special rights and duties in the governance of international society from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present.

is a PhD candidate at the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology and part of the Research Training Group "World Politics". His dissertation project focuses on the rise of large-scale field experiments in social policy since the 1990s, which are widely advocated as an instrument to determine 'what works' in policy making. Other research interests include the study of morality, science, innovation, and institutional change.

Kerem Gabriel Öktem is a Ph.D. candidate at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, scheduled to defend his dissertation on Welfare States in the Developing World in 2016. Öktem specialises in comparative social policy research and methods of quantitative and qualitative research. He is currently working in the research project "Mapping the Turkish Welfare State", financed by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBITAK), on quantitative and qualitative data production and data analysis. From 2017 onwards, he will be working in the research project "How `social´ is Turkey´ Turkey´s social security system in a European context", funded by the Stiftung Mercator. The project will locate Turkeys experience in the field of social security in the broader world of welfare states and trace specific social policies and their political and ideational backgrounds in four key areas of social security.

Publications:

• (with Erdogan, Cansu, 2020): Between welfare state and (state-organised) charity. How Turkey's social assistance regime blends two competing policy paradigms. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 40, 3/4, 205-219, first online: doi.org/10.1108/IJSSP-11-2018-0217
• (with Böger, Tobias, 2019): Levels or worlds of welfare? Assessing social rights and social stratification in Northern and Southern countries. Social Policy and Administration 53, 63-77.

is a Postdoctoral Researcher. She completed her PhD thesis, titled "Theorizing Regional Integration in the Caribbean: Neofunctionalism and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM)" at the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology, funded by the Excellence Initiative of the German Research Foundation. Her research interests includes the investigation of internal and external economic, social and political factors affecting regional economic and political integration in CARICOM and the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS).

is a lecturer at Bielefeld University. He has 15 years’ experience researching and writing about Indonesian regulatory regimes related to labour migration. Wayne’s current research projects focus on institutional capacity to enforce labour rights of foreigners in Indonesia. He teaches courses on labour rights enforcement and international organisations, integration in the Global South as well as on labour exploitation in the fisheries. Wayne is (co-)chief investigator on Australian Research Council-funded project Employment Relations in Indonesia’s Commercial Fishing Industry, which will also examine institutional responses to the labour rights of migrant fishers (co-investigated with M. Ford and D. S. Adhuri).

is professor of historical sociology at the faculty of sociology. His research interests focus on globalization and world society research, the sociology of expertise, religion, immigrant integration, and the state. His current research deals with early "think tanks" at the intersection of social science and politics and their influence on colonial policy in the German colonial empire.

Recent publications:

• (2020): Measures and Their Countermeasures. Reflexivity and Second-Order Reactivity in Quantifying Immigrant Integration, Sociological Forum 36: 206-225.
• (2019): Performing the Religious Economy in Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Missions: A 'Third Way' Approach to Studying Religious Markets, American Journal of Cultural Sociology 7: 321-349.
• (2018): The Global 'Bookkeeping' of Souls. Quantification and Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Missions, Social Science History 42: 183-211.

is professor of social anthropology at the Faculty of Sociology, Bielefeld University, Germany. Until July 2019, she was Senate member of the German Research Foundation, Dean of her Faculty and Co-Director of the Centre of Interdisciplinary research, ZIF. Her research focusses currently on knowledge production and circulation, on belonging as well as on the 'social life' (especially the nexus of inequality and heterogeneity) of universities. Prof. Pfaff-Czarnecka studied at the University of Zurich where she worked for many years as academic collaborator. She then shifted to the Centre for Development Studies at the University of Bonn where she acted as Senior Research Fellow, as Deputy Director, and as Acting Director. She worked for a number of development organizations as consultant, and as translator for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). She has taught and visited at the Universities Zurich, Bern, Oxford, Tokyo, JNU, New Delhi, and Kathmandu University. Among her publications are: 'Spaces of Violence in South Asian Democracies' (Special Issue at Asian Jounal of Social Science 45 (6), 2017, 'Das soziale Leben der Universität. Studentisches Leben zwischen Selbstfindung und Fremdbestimmung' (The Social Life of Universities. Students' Lives between Self-discovery and Heteronomy), Bielefeld: transcript, 2017; 'Facing Globalization in the Himalayas. Belonging and the Politics of the Self' (edited together with G. Toffin), New Delhi: Sage, 2014; 'Ethnic Futures', written together with A. Nandy, D. Rajasigham, T. Gomez, New Delhi: Sage, 1999.

Recent publications:

• (with Brosius, C., 2019): Shaping Asia: Connectivities, Comparisons, Collaborations, isa.e-Forum: 1-10.
• (2019): Sozialanthropologie im Schatten der Weltgesellschaft, in: Kruse, V., Strulik, T. (Eds.): Hochschulexperimentierplatz Bielefeld - 50 Jahre Fakultät für Soziologie, Bielefeld: transcript, 311-320.
• (with Kruckenberg, L. J., 2017): On the Margins of World Society: Working with Impoverished, Excluded and Marginalised People, in: Crawford G., Kruckenberg L. J., Loubere N., Morgan R. (Eds.): Understanding Global Development Research, London: Sage, 89-108.

brings more than 10 years of experience - as a researcher, lecturer and project manager - in the field of civil society, sustainable development and social capital, youth studies and national identity, and radicalization and violent extremism in Europe, Russia and Central Asia and, most recently, in the Middle East and North Africa. She holds a PhD in Sociology and Social Research from the Bielefeld University (Germany) and Trento University (Italy). Between 2012 and 2018, Dr. Pierobon served as manager of the St. Petersburg/Bielefeld Centre for German and European Studies (CGES/ZDES) funded by DAAD, of education exchange programs such as the ERASMUS Mundus Joint Doctorate "Globalization, the EU and Multilateralism (GEM)" funded by the European Commission and of collaborative research projects involving different universities in Central Asia. Since 2017, Dr. Pierobon has been senior manager of the research professionalization project "Between Stability and Transformation: Regional and Transnational Cooperation in Central Asia and between Central Asia and Europe" funded by Volkswagen Foundation. Dr. Pierobon is former Visiting Professor for Macrosociology and European Societies at the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg (Germany) and the University of Malaya/Asia-Europe Institute (Malaysia), Visiting Scholar at American University of Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan), German Kazakh-University (Kazakhstan), University of California/Berkeley (USA) and St. Petersburg State University (Russia) and Guest Lecturer at Ala-Too University (Kyrgyzstan), Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg (Germany) and Kyrgyz-National University (Kyrgyzstan).

Recent publications:

• (2020): Preventing Violent Extremism in Kyrgyzstan: the Role of the International Donor Community, Central Asia Policy Brief 56. Available at http://osce-academy.net/upload/file/Chiara_Pierobon.pdf
• (2020): Global Governance, Multi-Actor Cooperation, and Civil Society. In: Leal Filho W., Azul A., Brandli L., Özuyar P., Wall T. (eds.): Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions. Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Springer: Cham (DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-71066-2)
• (2019): The Power of Civil Society in the Middle East and North Africa: Peace-building, Change, and Development. Routledge: Abington (DOI 10.4324/9780429265006) edited with Natil, I. and Tauber, L.
• (2019): Introduction, in: Natil, I., Pierobon, C. and Trauber, L. (eds.): The Power of Civil Society in the Middle East and North Africa: Peace-Building, Change and Development. Routledge: Abington [with Natil, I. and Trauber, L.], 1-12.
• (2019): Introducing Civil Society, in: Natil, I., Pierobon, C. and Tauber, L. (eds.): The Power of Civil Society in the Middle East and North Africa: Peace-building, Change, and Development. Routledge: Abington [with Natil, I. and Trauber, L.], 13-23.
• (2019): Conclusion, in: Natil, I., Pierobon, C. and Trauber, L. (eds.): The Power of Civil Society in the Middle East and North Africa: Peace-Building, Change and Development. Routledge: Abington [with Natil, I. and Trauber, L.], 170-176.
• (2019): The EU, Civil Society, and Social Capital in Kazakhstan: a pilot evaluation of the EIDHR and NSA/LA, Journal of Evaluation, 25(2), 207-223 (DOI 10.1177/1356389018796023)
• (2019): Promoting sustainable development through civil society: a case study of the EU's NSA/LA thematic program in Kyrgyzstan, Development Policy Review, 37, 179-192 (Online first: DOI 10.1111/dpr.12411)

Nicola Piper, a political sociologist with PhD from the University of Sheffield in the UK, is the Founding Director of the Sydney Asia Pacific Migration Centre (University of Sydney) and former co-director of the Centre for Migration Policy Studies at Swansea University, UK. She is currently British Academy Global Professor Fellow at Queen Mary University of London’s School of Law. As a scholar of international labour migration whose main interest has been various manifestations of migrant worker precarity, her research on cross-border migration of workers has been informed by social movement scholarship, regulation/governance, human rights and labour studies. She is co-editor of the journal Global Social Policy (SAGE) and co-editor of two book series: Asian Migration (Routledge) and Mobility & Politics (Palgrave). Her current work focuses on the multifunctional role of the International Labour Organisation in the promotion of decent work for migrants within the multi-actor sphere of global migration governance. Key outputs on this topic to date (whilst others are still “in drafting”) are the following:

Recent publications:

• (2023): When Food is Finance: Seeking Global Justice for Migrant Workers. In: Studies in Social Justice Vol. 17 (1). Available at https://doi.org/10.26522/ssj.v17i1.4031 [with Simeone, L. and Rosewarne, S.]
• (2022): The International Labour Organisation as nodal player on the pitch of networked governance: shifting the goalposts for migrant workers in Qatar. In: Global Social Policy 22 (2): 323-340. (https://doi.org/10.1177/14680181211065240)
• (2021): Global partnerships in governing labour migration: the uneasy relationship between the ILO and IOM in the promotion of decent work for migrants. In: Global Public Policy and Governance 1 (3): 256-278. (https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-021-00022-x) [with Foley, L.]
• (2021): Global Labor Migration: Shifting Governance Regimes, Rights Deficits, and the Search for Order. In: LABOR – Studies in Working-Class History, vol. 18 (1): 67-86. (https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-8767350) [with Fanning, C.]
• (2017): Migrant Precarity: ‘Networks of Labour’ for a rights-based governance of migration. In: Development and Change 48 (5): 1089-1110. (DOI: 10.1111/dech.12337) [with Rosewarne, S. and Withers, M.]

Daniela Portella Sampaio is a Research Associate working at the project ‘The Worldviews of Ice: Cognitive frames and constructions of the Arctic and the Science/Politics interface’, led by Prof. Mathias Albert. Holding a doctoral degree in International Relations and a MRes in Sociology, she has been working as a Secretariat Advisor for Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meetings since 2015. She also held a Marie Curie Research Fellowship at the University of Leeds with the project POLARGOV, which investigated the Antarctic Treaty System governance, with special focus on fishing and tourism management. She was a finalist at the MSCA-Awards in 2019 in the category ‘Scientific Careers for Policy Making’. Currently, her research interests are the science/politics interface in the implementation process of instruments for the management of human and environmental emergencies in the Antarctic region.

Recent Publications:

• (2022). Diplomatic culture and institutional design: Analysing sixty years of Antarctic Treaty governance. Annals of the Brazilian Academy of Science 94 (1).
• (2019). The Antarctic exception: how science and environmental protection provided alternative authority deployment and territoriality in Antarctica. Australian Journal of Maritime & Ocean Affairs 11 (2): 107-119.
• (2017). A modest but intensifying power? Brazil, the Antarctic Treaty System and Antarctica, in: Dodds, Klaus, Peder Roberts and Alan Hemmings (eds.). Handbook on the Politics of Antarctica, Edward Elgar Publishing.

Working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Sociology at Bielefeld University, Ralf Rapior broadly addresses postcolonial critique of sociological knowledge. He examines Sociology’s Eurocentrism, imperial amnesia, entanglements and legacies. Engaging with postcolonial global and imperial history, he critically carries on the tradition of Historical Sociology. His main research fields are postcolonial and global historical sociologies, with specific interest in social history and theory of empires, states and societies, multiple modernities, globalizations and world society, and the form of sociology itself. His main publications are: „Imperien: Zur Soziologie einer vergessenen Vergesellschaftungsform“ [Empires: Towards a Sociology of a Forgotten Form of Societization] (forthcoming 2022, Frankfurt a.M.: Campus); „Bringing the Empire (Back) In: Zur Überwindung des Eurozentrismus in der Weltgesellschaftsforschung“ [Overcoming Eurocentrism in World Society Studies] (2020 in Bennani H, Bühler M, Cramer S, Glauser A (Eds): Global beobachten und vergleichen. Soziologische Analysen zur Weltgesellschaft, Frankfurt a.M.: Campus: 35-77); „There Is No Country That Has Not Passed Through a Colonial Regime: Zum Imperium als Grundbegriff historischer Soziologie“ [On Empire as a Basic Concept of Historical Sociology] (2019 in Burzan N (Ed): Komplexe Dynamiken globaler und lokaler Entwicklungen. Verhandlungen des 39. Kongresses der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie in Göttingen 2018, Essen: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie).

is postdoc researcher in the project "Diversity and Change of Parenting in Migrant Families" ("Diversität und Wandel der Erziehung in Migrantenfamilien"; DIWAN) at the Munich-based German Youth Institute (DJI). She studied sociology at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and holds a PhD from Bielefeld University. Eveline Reisenauer has participated in several national and international research projects on migration and transnationalisation, paying particular attention on personal relationships and families. Her monograph "Transnationale persönliche Beziehungen in der Migration" (Springer VS, 2017) is based on her PhD thesis. Moreover, she is a co-author of "Transnational Migration" (with Thomas Faist and Margit Fauser, Polity Press, 2013).

is a doctoral researcher in the project "Power comparisons in times of world-political change, 1970-2020" ("Machtvergleiche in Zeiten weltpolitischen Wandels, 1970-2020") at the Collaborative Research Centre 1288 "Practices of comparing" at Bielefeld University. Her research topics include power comparisons, the impact of information and communication technologies on the perception of power, and foreign policy (with a focus on North America). She holds a Bachelor's degree (B.A.) in Political Science and History from the University of Münster and a Master's degree (M.Sc.) in International Relations from the University of Bristol. Before joining Bielefeld University, she worked as researcher for European Schoolnet's Digital Citizenship department.

is Lecturer (Akademischer Rat) at Bielefeld University. His research interests are organizational sociology, political sociology, world society studies, historical sociology, and qualitative methodology. In his dissertation he studied the emergence of transparency as a global norm, its implementation in organizations, and unintended side-effects. His current research focuses on the history and institutionalization of rankings. He has published in Organization Studies and Research in the Sociology of Organizations. He holds a PhD from Heinrich-Heine-University Duesseldorf, Germany.

Recent publications:

• (with Brankovic, J. and T. Werron, 2020): The organizational engine of rankings: Connecting "new" and "old" institutionalism. Politics and Governance, special issue "Quantification in Higher Education", 8, 36-47.
• (2019): Unpacking the Transparency-Secrecy Nexus: Frontstage and Backstage Behaviour in a Political Party. Organization Studies, 40, 705-723.
• (2019): Transparenz in der Politik? Grenzen, Probleme und nicht intendierte Folgen. Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 71, 111-133.

is professor for Entangled History in the Americas (16th to 19th centuries) and director of the Center for InterAmerican Studies at Bielefeld University. She was trained as an economic, social, and environmental historian at the University of Bern, Switzerland, and received her PhD from the Ruhr-University Bochum. She conducted the research for her PhD in the interdisciplinary research context of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities Essen (KWI)'s program Climate and Culture, in which she was a PhD fellow from 2008 to 2012. Eleonora's current research focus brings together environmental history, and specifically climate impact- and disaster history with the perspective of entangled history(ies). In this context she is also interested in the Anthropocene and its important (and unequal) pre-history in the Americas and the Caribbean in particular. Eleonora is a co-initiator and co-organizer of Bielefeld University's interdisciplinary lecture series on the climate crisis Lectures for Future Bielefeld, she is a co-PI in the Collaborative Research Center (SFB) 1288 Practices of Comparing: Ordering and Changing the World and Co-Coordinator of the research group Coping with Environmental Crises at the Maria Sibylla Merian Center for Advanced Latin American Studies (CALAS), a BMBF-funded project between the Universities of Bielefeld, Kassel, Jena, Hannover and Guadalajara, Mexico.

Recent publications:

• (with Virginia García Acosta, 2020): Disasters, in: Tittor, Anne, Kaltmeier, Olaf, Leubolt, Bernhard, Hawkins, David, Rohland, Eleonora (eds.): The Routledge Handbook to the Political Economy and Governance of the Americas, Vol. II, Part II, New York: Routledge, p. 351-59.
• (2019): Changes in the Air. Hurricanes in New Orleans from 1718 to the Present, (Environmental History: International Perspectives 15), ed. by: Dolly Jorgensen, Christof Mauch, Kieko Matteson, and Helmuth Trischler, Berghahn Books: New York , Oxford.
• (with George Adamson and Matthew Hannaford, January 2018): Rethinking the Present: The Role of A Historical Focus in Climate Change Adaptation Research, in: Global Environmental Change, DOI: 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2017.12.003.

is a doctoral researcher at the Research Training Group "World Politics" at Bielefeld University and an associate researcher at the Centre for German and European Studies at Bielefeld University. Her doctoral project explores the political agenda of global cities in global governance. Tatiana received a double bachelor's degree in International Relations, Political Science, and Human Rights from Saint Petersburg State University and Bard College in the United States, as well as a master's degree in "Studies in European Societies" from St. Petersburg State University. Before joining the RTG, Tatiana researched for the think tank "European Politics" (Radboud University - St. Petersburg State University, project for the Netherlands Commission for UNESCO), Transparency International, World Heritage Watch, and the Institute for Development of Freedom of Information. Her research interests include transnational governance, non-state actors in world politics, urban sociology, and global urban politics.

is a Lecturer for Political Science at the Faculty of Sociology of Bielefeld University. Besides his work at Bielefeld University he is currently national representative in the NATO STO-Panel`Defending Democracy´. His current main research interests are the securitization of the cyber-and information-space, as well as the nexus of military theory and world society theory. Another field of research is his regional focus on security dynamics in East Asia.

Recent Publications:

• (2022). A ´Global Information Environment´? – Diffusion of Competences and Responsibilities from Sovereign States to International Organizations in the Global Information Environment. NATO-STO, IST-195.
• (2022). Strategisches Faserland – Warum die deutsche Wirtschaft deutsche Sicherheitspolitik strategiefähig macht. #GIDSessay

is a doctoral researcher at the Research Training Group "World Politics" at Bielefeld University. He studied Political Science and Sociology at the Universities of Bielefeld, Gent and Umeå. His PhD project investigates the emergence of eco-social policy discourses within the global governance system. Next to mapping the appearing eco-social policy scripts, general guiding question of the analysis is wether the emergence of eco-social policy discourses on a global level represents a shift of policy paradigms.

(M.A. European University Viadrina, Frankfurt Oder) is a doctoral researcher at the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology (BGHS) at the Faculty of Sociology at Bielefeld University. Her dissertation project focuses on involuntary return and migration dynamics in West Africa against the background of externalization of EU migration policies, and specifically the individual dimensions of post deportation in Mali. Her research interests include migration, development, transnational and local networks as well as integration, discrimination and gender relations. From 2009 to 2013, she worked at the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Geneva, Ankara and Nuremberg.

is researcher of organizational sociology and international business studies. His current research focuses on the internationalization processes of companies and its consequences for organizational theory. In his PHD-Project “Organizations as Multinational Companies” he develops a genuine organizational sociological point of view of internationalization processes of companies, focusing on the research question: What kind of organizational differences do internationalization processes have for companies as social systems? He is research assistant in the project: “The Globalization of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises”.

is a doctoral researcher at the chair for "European and International Politics" at European University Viadrina and a research associate of the project „The discursive construction of conflict and international organizational decision-making processes between normative frameworks of peacebuilding and securitization - the case of the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI)" at Bielefeld University, funded by the German Foundation for Peace Research. Her research focuses on world society theory and peace and conflict studies, the sociology of international relations, inclusion and exclusion processes of ethnic minorities and European Foreign and Security Policy. Current projects include research on global dimensions of intrastate conflicts – especially relations between ethnic minorities and international organizations (PhD project) as well as an article on UN interventions from a world society perspective (forthcoming in 2014, co-authored with Kerstin Eppert and Mathias Albert).

is research fellow at Bielefeld University. He has been assistant professor at Leiden University and visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. He has written extensively on the theory of history, time and temporality, and the challenges posed by technology and the Anthropocene to the human condition and to modern historical thinking. His articles can be read in journals ranging from History and Theory to The Anthropocene Review. He is the author of History in Times of Unprecedented Change: A Theory for the 21st Century (Bloomsbury, 2019) and The Epochal Event: Transformations in the Entangled Human, Technological, and Natural Words (Palgrave, 2020).

is a doctoral researcher at the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology (BGHS) and a member of the Research Training Group "World Politics". Her dissertation examines the emergence and rise of world society from the perspective of international law. Its main goal is to prove that world society is progressing, throughout legal development, in a more robust way than estimated even by the most optimistic English School theorists. Simsek received her M.A. in International Relations from Université Galatasaray, Istanbul. Among her general research interests are English School theory, international humanitarian law, critical approaches to international relations, challenges, and reconstruction of the current world order.

is a postdoctoral researcher in the DFG funded Project “Expatriate Manager. A New Cosmopolitan Elite? Habitus, Every Day Practices and Networks”. She has carried our research on translocal spaces and transnationalization of knowledge in different empirical fields. In her research on translocal life worlds of female Bolivian migrants in the Global City Buenos Aires she concentrated on dance as a translocal practice. As a researcher in the VW funded Project „Negotiating Development: Translocal Gendered Spaces in Muslim Societies“ and in her doctoral dissertation she focused on the transnational negotiations of public spheres, Women's and Human Rights in islamizing Malaysia. In the current project on Expatriate Managers she carries out research on highly skilled migration and mobility in the context on transnational corporations. Her main research interests are: transnationalization and mobility, skilled and non skilled migration, global civil society, global negotiations of knowledge, processes of identity construction in Latin America and Southeast Asia, global ethnography.

is Professor of International Politics and Conflict Studies. His research priorities are theories of international politics in global modernity, primarily from a historical-sociological and socio-theoretical perspective; empires and (post)colonialism in international politics; politics, conflicts and society in the Middle East, specializing in particular on Israel and Palestine; and EU foreign relations, specializing in particular on the European Neighborhood Policy. His research work appears in leading journals and with leading book publishers. In 2014, following his studies at the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), he obtained his doctorate with a thesis on EU foreign and domestic policy at the LSE, which included a six-month period of study at the European University Institute in Florence. From 2003 to 2006, he was a research associate in the Political Science Education and Research Department and at the Institute of World Society at the University of Bielefeld. From 2007 to 2008, Stephan Stetter was a deputy professor for political science at the University of Bielefeld, where he gained his Habilitation in January 2008. Since October 2008, he has been Professor at the Bundeswehr University Munich. From 2012 to 2018, Stephan Stetter was a co-speaker of the International Relations section of the Deutsche Vereinigung für Politische Wissenschaft (German Association for Political Science). Since 2010, he has been one of the editors of the Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen (https://zib-online.org/), working together with Prof. Carlo Masala from 2010 to 2014 as managing editor. From 2014 to 2018, he was the Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Public Affairs.

Recent publications:

• Stephan Stetter & Mitra Moussa Nabo (eds.) 2020: Middle East Christianity: Local Practices, World Societal Entanglements, New York: Palgrave, 2020.
• Dietrich Jung & Stephan Stetter (eds.) 2018: Modern Subjectivities in World Society: Global Structures and Local Practices, New York: Palgrave, 2018.

is Professor of Political Sociology at the Faculty of Sociology. In his work he explores the intertwinement of science and politics in world society, the role of expertise in public policy, the ways economic discourses shape social regulation and the governance networks in and between policy areas such as consumer policy, food safety, energy, mobility, global health and climate change. Holger is appointed member of the Ethics Commission at Bielefeld University and elected board member at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies of Science (ISOS). He is a member of the editorial board of the Critical Policy Studies Journal and co-editor of the Advances in Critical Policy Book Series. Among his most recent publications is the "Handbook of Behavioural Change and Public Policy" (2019, co-edited with S. Beck.).

is a doctoral researcher in the DFG project “How rankings are being produced” at Bielefeld University. Her research project focuses on the intersection of climate change, global governance, and comparative practices in the case study of the Climate Change Performance Indicator. Elisabeth Strietzel joined the project in June 2022 after studying sociology at Bielefeld University. Her current research interests include sociological theory, sociology of comparisons, science and social practices as well as world society studies.

is Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Sociology, Bielefeld University. His main areas of research are sociological theory, economic sociology, organizational sociology and political sociology. Focusing on the emergence and the consequences of cognitive forms of regulation, he is particularly concerned with regulatory innovations in the field of global finance.

is a doctoral researcher who has participated in the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology (BGHS), Faculty of Sociology at Bielefeld University, since October 2020. He studied International Relations and Political Science at Ramkhamhaeng University in Thailand. Currently, he is also a faculty member affiliated with the Department of Public Administration, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Valaya Alongkorn Rajabhat University in Thailand since 2015. He is now working on a cumulative dissertation with a focus on Transnational Health Policy investigating, in the particular case, of how Thailand's health system and governance like in the multilevel contexts. His interests include transnational social policy, migration, health governance, and regional social policy and integration.

is a doctoral researcher at the chair for "European and International Politics" at European University Viadrina and a research associate of the project „The discursive construction of conflict and international organizational decision-making processes between normative frameworks of peacebuilding and securitization - the case of the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI)" at Bielefeld University, funded by the German Foundation for Peace Research. Her research focuses on world society theory and peace and conflict studies, the sociology of international relations, inclusion and exclusion processes of ethnic minorities and European Foreign and Security Policy. Current projects include research on global dimensions of intrastate conflicts – especially relations between ethnic minorities and international organizations (PhD project) as well as an article on UN interventions from a world society perspective (forthcoming in 2014, co-authored with Kerstin Eppert and Mathias Albert).

(MA, University of Heidelberg) is completing her PhD at the Institute for World Society Studies at the University of Bielefeld (Germany). Her dissertation project focuses on the institutionalization of early childhood as a global issue. Her research interests include world society studies, globalisation, childhood, semiotics, visual sociology, and embodied sociology. Current publications are "The cultural construction of Global Social Policy. Theorizing Formations and Transformations", Global Social Policy 13 (1) 2013, 24-44; "Universalizing Early Childhood: History, Forms and Logics" in Twum-Danso Imoh, A. and Ame, R. (eds.), Childhoods at the Intersection of the Local and the Global, Palgrave, 2012, 34-55; "Ungleiche Kindheiten aus globalerPerspektive.Internationale Indikatoren und die Konstruktion von Kindheit" (Unequal childhoods from a global perspective. International indicators and the construction of childhood), Diskurs Kindheits- und Jugendforschung 4 2009, 471-486.

(Dr. rer. pol.) is a post-doctoral researcher within the BMBF-funded project “The Americas as Space of Entanglements” at the Center for InterAmerican Studies at Bielefeld University. Her research interests are theories of development, social movements, environmental and health policy and gender relations with a strong focus on Latin America. She has done field research in Argentina, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala. Her recent publications are: Financialisation of Food, Land, and Nature. Special Issue of the Austrian Journal of Development Studies, Vol. XXX 2-2014, special issue co-editor together with Jenny Simon (2014); Geschlechterregime und Sozialpolitik in Argentinien und Bolivien, in: Tuider, Elisabeth/ Burchardt, Hans-Jürgen/ Öhlschläger, Rainer (Hrsg.): Frauen (und) Macht in Lateinamerika, Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlag (2013); Gesundheitspolitik in Lateinamerika. Konflikte um Privatisierungen in Argentinien und El Salvador, Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlag (2012).

is a research associate in the DFG research project "A Theory of World Entities" at the faculty of sociology of Bielefeld University. Her dissertation project at the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology (BGHS) explores the role of inter-organizational cooperation for the Arctic Council and the advancement of sustainable development in the Arctic. She received her Bachelor's degree in "Integrated European Studies" at the University of Bremen and her Master's degree in "Political Science: Democratic Governance and Civil Society" at the Osnabrück University. Her main research interests include international politics and international organizations, especially the Arctic Council and the G7/G20, and sustainable development.

is a Doctoral Researcher with the Research Training Group "World Politics" at Bielefeld University. Entitled "Conflicts in World Society", his dissertation reconstructs inter-struggle relations as a dimension of the historical emergence of world society. His research interests lie at the intersection of sociological theory, world society theory, and historical sociology. Oday received his B.A. from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and an M.A. from the Free University of Berlin. During his studies, he worked as a student assistant with the Chair of International Politics and Conflict Studies at Bundeswehr University Munich, where he served as a member of the editorial team of the Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen (ZIB), as well as the Collaborative Research Center (SFB) 700 "Governance in Areas of Limited Statehood" at the Free University of Berlin.

is Professor for European Studies at Bielefeld University and Director of the Centre for German and European Studies (CGES) at Bielfeld University and Saint Petersburg State University. His research interests include International Relations (IR) and European Studies as well as International Political Theory (IPT), Europe-Asia Relations, Comparative Regionalization in World Society, intern- and transcultural relations and borders, boundaries and limits in World Society.

Recent publications:

• (2019): Security in the sovereignty-governmentality continuum. Cambridge Review of International Affairs (CRIA) 32(6), 681-711.
• (2019): Globalisierung und Entfremdung: Ein kurzer Essay. Psychoanalytische Familientherapie: Zeitschrift für Paar-, Familien- und Sozialtherapie 20(II), 11-22.
• (2019): Fixing Missions. Überlegungen zu einem Typus des demokratischen Krieges zwischen liberalem Interventionismus und demokratischer Imperialität. In: Hausteiner E. M., Huhnholz S., (eds.): Imperien verstehen: Theorien, Typen, Transformationen. Ordnungen globaler Macht. Vol 1. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 129-168.
• (with Herrmann, G., 2017): Democratic War and Liberal Violence: On Ending the "Silent Treatment" Between Democratic War Research and Governmentality Studies. In: Neuhäuser, C., Schuck, C. (eds.): Military Interventions: Considerations from Philosophy and Political Science. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 239-261.

is a historian and Doctoral Researcher in the Research Training Group "World Politics" who is researching the construction and organization of International Relations in Hispanic-America in the first half of the nineteenth century. The title of her Doctoral project is "The Creation of American Regional Integration and the Origination of the Inter-American System after Independence. The Congress of Panama (1826) and the American Congress of Lima (1847)".

University of Melbourne, Australia. She has held visiting positions at Harvard, MIT, University of Amsterdam, University of Vienna and London School of Economics. Her field of interest are globalized spheres of political communication and the influence on societies. She has published widely in this area. Among her recent publications: "The Handbook of Global Media Research" (Wiley Blackwell, 2012) and the monograph "The Global Public Sphere" (Polity, Cambridge, 2014).

Zhenwei Wang is a doctoral student in Sociology at Bielefeld University. Her research interests include migration, doing family, care and new media. In the dissertation project she investigates the distant caregiving and family making process in translocal families in China from the perspective of gender and class. She finished the 10-month multi-sited fieldwork in Eastern China in 2021 and is now drafting the thesis. Zhenwei holds Master’s degree (M.A.) in Sociology from The Chinese University of Hong Kong and from Bielefeld University.

Dorothea Wehrmann is a researcher at the German Developement Institute/Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE). She holds a doctoral degree in Political Science and studied Social Sciences, Political Communication and InterAmerican Studies. Her research areas inclue international and transnational cooperation in networks, private sector engagement in development cooperation, and the politics of the Polar Regions.

Recent publications:

• (with Petersen, Mirko, 2020): Geopolitics, in: Kaltmeier, Olaf, Anne Tittor, Daniel Hawkins, and Eleonora Rohland (e ds.): The Routledge handbook to the political economy and governance of the Americas, London: Routledge, 362-370.
• (2018): Critical geopolitics of the polar regions: an inter-american perspective, Abingdon; New York: Routledge.
• (2018): Incentivising and regulating multi-actor partnerships and private-sector engagement in development cooperation, (Discussion Paper 21/2018).
• (with Albert, Mathias, 2017): Zwischen Kooperation und Konflikt, zwischen Zentralität und Marginalität: die Arktis im Spiegel politikwissenschaftlicher Forschung, in: Schriftenreihe Geoinformationsdienst der Bundeswehr/Jahresheft Geopolitik (2), 15-24.
• (2017): Non-State actors in Arctic Council governance, in: Keil, Kathrin and Sebastian Knecht (eds.), Governing arctic change: global perspectives, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 187-206.

has been working on global social policy and social protection in the global South for several years. In order to contribute new knowledge to the global perspective on social policy, she has lately dedicated her major research to an extensive and systematical analysis of the national arrangements of social assistance. She is a member of the FLOOR research project on social cash transfers, which is part of the interdisciplinary FLOOR research group on social security as a human right. In cooperation with two team colleagues she has produced the currently most comprehensive data base on social assistance in cash in the countries of the global South. By selective insights in national cases, such as a study in South Africa, she has learned a lot about different views on social protection in different contexts.

Katrin Weible graduated from the University of Heidelberg, Germany, with a Master´s degree in Sociology, Political Science, and Public International Law. She is currently writing her PhD thesis. Until early 2014, she is a visiting research fellow at the Brooks World Poverty Institute at the University of Manchester, UK. Doctoral Dissertation: Social Protection in the Global South. Data construction, conceptualization, and institutional analysis of Social Cash Transfers.

is professor of modern history at Bielefeld University. Fields of research: Transnational and comparative history (19th-20th centuries), with special focus on: Transformation of the state (security, policing, terrorism); urban violence (juvenile delinquency, drug consumption); labour (social movements, collective action, protest).

Recent publications:

• (2017): Spatialized Communication: Future Research Perspectives on Urban Youth Violence and on Terrorism, in: Crime, History and Societies 21 (2), 309-319.
• (2017): World War I and Urban Societies: Social movements, fears, and spatial order in Hamburg and Chicago (c. 1916-23), in: Rinke, Stefan and Michael Wildt (eds.): Revolutions and Counter-Revolutions: 1917 and its aftermath from a global perspective, Frankfurt/New York, 287-306.
• (co-editor, 2015): Germany 1916-23. A Revolution in Context, Bielefeld.
• (with Sylvia Schraut, 2014): Terrorism, Gender and History. Special issue: Historical Social Research 3/2014.

was professor for the history of modern societies at Bielefeld University and director of the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology. His research interests included the history of capitalism and modernity, the history of social movements, the history of work and workers, media history, and theoretical and methodological issues in historiography.

is doing her PhD in the area of Global History on German colonialism with a special focus on the intersections of environmental history, knowledge transfers, and racism. She completed her Master's at the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS) at Osnabrück University and worked as a manager at the Institute for World Society at the faculty of sociology at Bielefeld University. From March 2024, she will be working in the Prorectorate for Science and Society in the areas of diversity and sustainability and in the Sustainability Office at Bielefeld University. Her special research interests lie in the concept of Intersectionality, Post Colonial Studies, Gender Studies, and Migration Studies.

Recent publication:

• (2024): Frauen im deutschen Kolonialismus. Aushandlungsprozesse der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft und des Frauenbundes im kolonialen Migrations- und Genderregime. IMIS Working Paper 18, Institut für Migrationsforschung und Interkulturelle Studien (IMIS) der Universität Osnabrück. Osnabrück: IMIS.

studied Social Sciences and History (BA), and Sociology (MA). He is now researching the history of university rankings in the DFG-funded project "Zur Institutionalisierung der Rankings. Diskurskarrieren tabellarischer Leistungsvergleiche 1850-1980" at Bielefeld University.

Recent publication:

• Grenzarbeit im Kunstbetrieb. Zur Institutionalisierung des Rankings Kunstkompass, in: Ringel, Leopold und Tobias Werron (Hg.): Rankings - Soziologische Fallstudien. Wiesbaden: VS (forthcoming).

graduated from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2018 and her PhD was in social anthropology. It concerned selective versions of heritage and how these inform national identity and political legitimacy and was researched through 15 months ethnographic fieldwork in Luang Prabang in Northern Laos. This city was the former royal capital (until the establishment of Laos as a one party state in 1975) and is generally recognised as the centre of Lao culture, yet is a place with a very turbulent and contested history. Phill is now writing a monograph based on her thesis, which is forthcoming with Amsterdam University Press.

More recently, Phill is interested in the growing presence of China in Laos and is now researching a project on the first railway system in Laos, which is to be a high speed rail network. The project uses this as a tool through which to examine how China is perceived, understood and negotiated in Laos. Phill has just returned from a long period of fieldwork and will return for a follow up visit in 2020.

was educated at the University of Zurich, from where he received a PhD in social anthropology in 1992 and a habilitation two years later. He joined Princeton University in 2012 as the Hughes-Rogers Professor of Sociology and a Faculty Associate in Politics. From 2014 onward he will direct Princeton's Fung Global Fellows Program. His research aims to understand the dynamics of nation-state formation, ethnic boundary making and political conflict from a comparative perspective. He has pursued these themes across the disciplinary fields of sociology, political science, and social anthropology and amateured in various methodological and analytical strategies: field research in Oaxaca (Mexico) and Iraq, comparative historical analysis, quantitative cross-national research, network studies, formal modeling, the analysis of large-scale survey data, as well as policy oriented research.

is professor of sociology at the University of Bielefeld and Senior Research Associate at St. Edmund's College/University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on the intersection of gender and sociology of religion with a particular interest in (transcultural) knowledge production and the shifting of symbolic orders. The regional emphasis of her studies is on selected countries in the Mashriq; this includes an entangled, shared social histories perspective shaped by postcolonial approaches. Recent publications are: Global historical sociology and connected gender sociologies. On the colonial legacy and (re)nationalization of gender, in: Interdisciplines. Journal of History and Sociology 9 (2) 2018, 95-142. Multiple religiosities, entangled modernities and gender: what is different about gender across religious cultures? in: Zeitschrift für Religion, Gesellschaft und Politik 1 (1) 2018, 89-109 and Religion, Orientalism and the Colonial Body of Gender Knowledge, in: Religion in Context. Handbook, ed. by H. Winkel together with A. Schnabel and M. Reddig. Baden- Baden: Nomos.

is Deputy Director of the Peace Institute Frankfurt am Main (PRIF) and Professor of International Relations at the Faculty of Social Sciences and History at the Technische Universität Darmstadt. His research interests include the role of non-state actors in global governance, in particular their contributions to just peace governance. He is co-author of "The Role of Business in Global Governance” (with Annegret Flohr et al., Palgrave MacMillan, 2010) and has co-edited several books related to transnational governance processes, inter alia, "The Transnational Governance of Violence and Crime: Non State Actors in Security (with Anja P. Jakobi, Palgrave MacMillan, 2013) and “Corporate Security Responsibility? Corporate Governance Contributions to Peace and Security in Zones of Conflict” (with Nicole Deitelhoff, Palgrave MacMillan, 2010). He is principal investigator in the Cluster of Excellence “Normative Orders” and Speaker of the Leibniz Research Alliance on “Crises in a Globalised World”.

is researcher of sociology of work, employment and Chinese sociology. His current research focuses on the careers of Chinese professionals working in Chinese subsidiaries of German-based multinational companies. In his PHD-Project “The Chinese White Collar Managers in Foreign Invested Enterprises and Their careers”, firstly, he explore the discrepancy between the career expectations of the Chinese professionals and practices of human resource management in MNCs. The main reason for this discrepancy is the difference of time horizon of expectations/orientations. Secondly, the identification of Chinese professionals with their MNC employers varies in different career orientations. Particularly, the increasing career rationalization of Chinese professionals working in MNCs accelerates the demythologization of MNCs in China.

Junchen Yan is research assistant in the DFG-project: “Expatriate Managers: A New Cosmopolitan Elite? Habitus, Everyday Practices, and Networks” and in the HBS-project: “Going Global” or “Short-Term Adventures”? The Conditions and Consequences of the Globalization of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises.

pursued a MA (Master of Arts) Degree in Governance and Development Studies with specialization in Development Management from Jimma University, Ethiopia. Abel earned his BA (Bachelor of Arts) Degree in Governance and Development Studies from Hawassa University, Ethiopia. He worked as a lecturer (From Oct. 2015- July 2018) at the Department of Governance and Development studies in Wolkite University, Ethiopia. He briefly worked as lecturer at the department of Civics and Ethical Studies in Wachemo University, Ethiopia from Aug. 2018- March 2019. Currently he is a doctoral student at the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology (BGHS) at the Faculty of Sociology at Bielefeld University, Germany. His doctoral dissertation project focuses on the association between Migration, Remittances and Rural Livelihood.

Research interests: Migration, Governance and Development