Regional coordinators

Matthias Basedau is Matthias Basedau is director of the GIGA Institute of African Affairs in Hamburg and adjunct Professor at Hamburg University. Besides studying democracy and political parties, he focusses on peace and conflict studies. In particular, he investigates the role of ethnicity, political institutions, natural resources and religion as determinants of conflict. His regional focus is sub-Saharan Africa. He received his PhD from Heidelberg University with a thesis on the conditions of democracy in sub-Saharan Africa.

Aurel Croissant is Professor of Political Science at Heidelberg University. His research interests include civil–military relations, democratization studies, conflict studies, comparative authoritarianism and Asian politics. His has published Party Politics, Pacific Review, Democratization, Journal of Democracy, Electoral Studies, Asian Survey, Democracy & Security, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, and Terrorism and Political Violence, among others. He is editor of the journal Democratization and member of the Academic Advisory Boards of the Sustainable Governance Indicators (SGI), the Bertelsmann Transformation Index (BTI) and the German Institute for Global Affairs (GIGA).

Ariam Macias Herrera is a research fellow and doctoral candidate at the Institute for Political Science at Heidelberg University. Her research focuses on democratization studies, democratic backsliding, populism, and civil-military relations with a regional focus on Latin America. In her doctoral thesis, she examines the military’s role in the process of democratic backsliding in Latin America. She holds an MA in Political Science from Heidelberg University and BA in International Relations and Global Studies from the University of Texas at Austin.

Since 2022, Anja Osei is Professor of Comparative Politics with a focus on Africa at the Otto Suhr Institute of the Free University of Berlin. She received her PhD in 2010 from the Institute of African Studies in Leipzig with a dissertation entitled “Party–Voter Linkage in Ghana and Senegal in Comparative Perspective.” From 2010 to 2022, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Konstanz, where she also led, among other projects, the EU-funded project “Do Legislatures Enhance Democracy in Africa?” Her research interests include democratization, political institutions, political elites, and political parties in Africa, as well as social network analysis. Anja Osei has extensive fieldwork experience in Ghana, Senegal, Togo, Sierra Leone, Mali, Burkina Faso, Gabon, Cameroon, Uganda, Botswana, and Tanzania.

Siegmar Schmidt is Professor for International Relations and Comparative Government at the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany. He is also scientific director of the Frank Loeb Institute. Previously he had worked as an assistant professor at the University of Trier and the University of Mainz. He held the Willy Brand Chair of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2003/04. His research interests and a wide range of publications focus on African politics, development issues, foreign policy of Western states and European integration.

Allan Sikk is a Professor of Comparative Politics at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES). His research focusses on the evolution of political parties and party systems, electoral candidates, parliamentary party instability, political methodology and democratization. Prof Sikk is a Co-Principal Investigator of INSTAPARTY: Party Instability in Parliaments project funded by the Norwegian Research Council. His recent publications include Party People: Candidates and Party Evolution (Oxford University Press); he has published in a wide range of political science and area studies journals.

Hans-Joachim Spanger holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Goethe University Frankfurt. He is Associate Fellow at the Leibniz Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF) and previously served as Head of Department and Member of PRIF's Executive Board. His research interests include European security, democratization and democracy promotion with a regional focus on Russia. Moreover, he was a Research Fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, Chairman of the Advisory Board for Civilian Crisis Prevention at the German Foreign Office, and Visiting Professor at the National Research University - Higher School of Economics in Moscow from 2017 to 2021.

Christoph Trinn works as a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Political Science of Heidelberg University. His main research interests focus on the intersection between conflict, regime and culture. Current and previous research projects have addressed religious and ethnic conflicts, mass protests and riots, social cohesion, hybrid regimes, autonomy arrangements, diffusion processes, nonlinear escalation dynamics and conflict forecasting. His regional focus is on South Asia. Moreover, he is a member of the German Association for Political Science (DVPW).

Jan Claudius Völkel is Academic Dean at the IES Abroad Freiburg and Associate Researcher at the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute, University of Freiburg. His research focuses on contemporary developments in the Middle East and North Africa. He worked at the universities of Freiburg, Salzburg, Innsbruck, Cairo, Amman, Duhok (Iraqi Kurdistan), al-Quds and the European University Institute in Florence. From 2017 to 2019, he was Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, conducting research on the role of national parliaments in Arab transformation processes. He was visiting researcher at the universities of Dundee, Istanbul (Bahçeşehir), Montreal and Odense. He is an alumnus of the Arab-German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Martin Welz is Professor of International Relations at the University of the Bundeswehr Munich. His research focuses on African history and politics, the African Union, Africa’s role in the world, as well as international orders and conflict management. His expertise on Africa is based, among other things, on extended study visits and field research in numerous countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Martin Welz earned his doctorate at the University of Konstanz with a dissertation on the African Union. He has published in leading academic journals such as African Affairs, International Affairs, and International Peacekeeping. In 2021, his book Africa since Decolonization: The History and Politics of a Diverse Continent was published in German and English by Kohlhammer and Cambridge University Press respectively.