Nicole Deitelhoff

At a time when one crisis has followed another for years, people and political institutions are coming under increasing pressure. There was the financial crisis of 2008, followed by the European debt crisis, the refugee and migration crisis, then the pandemic, which was directly followed by the Russian war against Ukraine and inflation. Today, politics is in crisis mode. There is no more time to take a deep breath, process experiences, discuss them and learn from them. Yet it is an essential feature of democracy that it negotiates all central issues in a contentious manner. “We keep forgetting that democracy cannot be taken for granted, that people have fought for it and that we also have to work for democracy every day,” states political scientist Nicole Deitelhoff.

Nicole Deitelhoff has headed the PRIF – Leibniz Institute for Peace and Conflict Research in Frankfurt am Main since 2016. In 2009, she became Professor of International Relations and Theories of Global Governance at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, has been a Fellow at the New Institute Hamburg since 2022 and was awarded a LOEWE Top Professorship at Goethe University Frankfurt in 2023.