PhD program - Global Studies Peace and Security in Africa

The programme trains junior researchers and professionals in globalisation research. It qualifies them for employment, among others, in international organizations, in the field of conflict management, prevention and resolution and early warning (as well as other areas of the emerging African peace and security architecture). Our students qualify also as future lecturers, scholars and researchers for the rapidly expanding higher education sector in Ethiopia and its neighbouring countries; enabling these future elites to “think globally”.

Area Studies – as the study of particular cultural, national or geographic regions – refers to interdisciplinary research fields, which draw on a variety of methods and academic perspectives, ranging from established disciplines such as History, Political Science, Sociology, Political Economy and Cultural Sciences to newly emerging subdisciplines as, for instance, New Political Geography and Global History. By analyzing the implications globalization processes have on different world regions, Global Studies are strongly linked to Area Studies. Global and Area Studies – as a combination of social and cultural as well as historical approaches to the study of modern and contemporary globalisation processes and the comparison of world regions – offer the scientific basis of this PhD programme to develop an understanding for the dynamics of peace and security in Africa.

Since Africa is faced with global challenges in particular ways, the study programme intends to pay special attention to regional perspectives on globalisation processes and – in light of the continent’s specific contemporary challenges – to the multifaceted aspects of peace and security in Africa.