27.10.2021 We welcome Felix Anderl at the Center for Conflict Studies

We are very pleased to welcome Felix Anderl to the Center for Conflict Studies. Starting in November, he will enrich research and teaching at the Center as a professor for conflict studies (W1).

Before joining Philipps University Marburg, Felix held postdoctoral positions at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt and the University of Cambridge. He obtained his PhD at Goethe University Frankfurt where he also worked at the Cluster of Excellence “The Formation of Normative Orders” for several years.

Felix focuses on conflicts over land, food, and rural development. In doing so, he links the disciplines of social movement studies, International Relations, and conflict research, emphasizing field research, such as participant observation in both social movements and the institutions they oppose. He utilizes a mix of methods such as discourse analysis and ethnographic approaches and has gained much of his experience during fieldwork in Southeast Asia, especially Indonesia.

Felix is the co-speaker of the DVPW thematic group “Ethnographic Methods in Political Science”. He is a member of the International Organizing Committee of the Asia Europe Peoples’ Forum, a trustee of Stiftung Asienhaus, and a member of the Institut für Protest- und Bewegungsforschung.

Felix has published on the production of and resistance to the international political and economic order, particularly the interaction of social movements and international organizations. His work appeared in leading journals such as Review of International Organizations, Millennium, International Studies Review, and Social Movement Studies amongst others. His book “Broken Solidarities: How Open Global Governance Divides and Rules” will come out with Bristol University Press in 2022.

In the next years, Felix will build on his research with transnational peasant movements and focus on rural conflicts in a comparative view. Increasingly, the conflicts around land and food that he has been observing in Southeast Asia gain traction in Western Europe, too. Social movements in the countryside will most likely gain increasing traction and salience due to climate change and corporate capture of agriculture and land distribution. Felix will work on the conflicts that arise in these contexts and hopes to offer some of his expertise from Southeast Asia to European movements and institutions.