Michael Giesen
I am a Post-Doc Researcher at the University of Potsdam working on international organizations, human rights, and environmental politics. I hold a Ph.D. from Free University Berlin with a thesis on the diversification of IOs and violence against women policies.
About me
I am a political scientist specializing in international relations. My interests are in all the organizational dimensions of international political life. This includes predominantly formal and informal international organizations of various kinds, specifically in human rights and environmental politics. In my Ph.D. research project, “The Two Faces of International Organizations,” I investigated the changing internal diversity of political knowledge production within international organizations and their consequences for framing international policies to fight violence against women. The thesis won the Ernst-Reuter Award 2021 for the best dissertation in Political Science, Law, and Economics at Free University Berlin.
I am currently working on several projects. My post-doc reserach project explores interactions of organizational diversification processes in international organizations and the global human rights regime. I am also working with Thomas Gehring (Bamberg) and Thomas Rixen (FU Berlin) on agency dynamics of international horizontal organizations in global environmental politics. My skill set include various methods and research designs, ranging from quantitative data analysis to qualitative discourse analysis, often using mixed methods and comparative approaches.
I hold a BA in Political Science from the Chemnitz University of Technology and a MA in International Relations from a joint program by Free University Berlin, Humboldt-University Berlin, and the University of Potsdam, and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Free University Berlin. Beyond that, my studies have taken me to live and research in Norway, Belgium, Israel, and the United States.
