Sonja Grimm - EDP Network

Sonja Grimm

EDP Network Member

Sonja Grimm is the Chair of International Relations and European Studies at the Institute of Political Science and Sociology at the Julius-Maximilians-University Würzburg. She is a political scientist with a strong background in International Relations, European Integration and Comparative Politics and a keen interest in applied qualitative and quantitative methodology of social science inquiry. Before coming to Würzburg, she was an Adjunct Professor at the Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Konstanz (D), having completed her habilitation thesis in 2018. Priorly, she has been Senior Lecturer at the University of Konstanz (D) and Replacement Professor at the Universites of Basel (CH), Göttingen (D), Mannheim (D), Konstanz (D) and Würzburg (D). She earned her PhD from Humboldt University Berlin (D) in 2010 while being a researcher at the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB).

Sonja is the Scientific Lead and Co-Coordinator of the collaborative research consortium EMBRACE, funded by the European Commission. She is founding member of the research network External Democracy Promotion and she is Principal Investigator of the Bavarian Alliance of Peace, Conflict and Security Research FoKS.

In her research, she specializes in the field of crisis management, democratization and state-building in developing, transitioning, fragile and post-conflict contexts. Her research focuses on causes and consequences of violent conflict, state fragility, and the politics of international state-building and externally overseen democratization. In her habilitation thesis, she investigates strategies and instruments of EU and UN democracy promotion, studies their effects, and offers innovative explanations as of why international democracy promotion is often less effective than assumed. The habilitation thesis is based on two original datasets, expert interviews and several in-depth case studies. In her PhD thesis, she investigated political reorganisation after military intervention.

Sonja teaches regularly courses about International Relations and Global Governance, particularly organizations, actors and selected policy fields, and about European Studies and European foreign affairs. Courses on statebuilding, development cooperation and democracy promotion as well as the causes and consequences of conflict, courses about social justice and global sustainability complete her teaching portfolio.

More about Sonja’s research can be found here and here, more about her teaching can be found here.

Contact: sonja.grimm [at] external-democracy-promotion.eu