Institute News

Justus Liebig University Giessen awarded Eva Maria Gajek the venia legendi for Modern and Contemporary History in December following her habilitation lecture “Vom Unfall zur Ordnung: Die Kutsche und die Entwicklung von Verkehrsräumen im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert.” In her habilitation thesis, “Auf der Suche nach den Reichen: Eine Wahrnehmungs- und Wissensgeschichte von Reichtum im langen 20. Jahrhundert in Deutschland,” she focuses on the history of wealth in Germany from the 1880s to reunification. more

Philipp Golka was presented with the Timothy Sinclair Best Paper Award for 2024 at the annual convention of the International Studies Association in March 2025 in Chicago, Illinois. He received the award for his paper “Epistemic Gerrymandering: ESG, Impact Investing, and the Financial Governance of Sustainability,” which was published in Review of International Political Economy. more

The MPIfG Board of Trustees met in Cologne for its annual meeting in February 2025. Chaired by Michael Hüther of the German Economic Institute IW, the meeting was attended by Patrick Bernau (FAS), Witich Roßmann (DGB-Stadtverband Cologne), Andrea Blome (City of Cologne), Martin Börschel (NRW.BANK Düsseldorf), and Andrea Kienle (NRW Ministry of Culture and Science).  more

Stephan Gruber successfully defended his dissertation, “Discipline and Promise: The Rise of Neoliberalism in Peru (1945–2000),” at the University of Duisburg-Essen's Faculty of Social Sciences in February. His research shows that neoliberal hegemony in Peru was not primarily shaped by external influences but by internal developments. more

Philipp Golka was appointed to the extended editorial board of the journal Finance and Society in March 2025, where he will take up the position of Reviews and Communications Editor. He is one of five editors newly appointed by the publisher to introduce fresh perspectives to the journal’s publication agenda. more

For long-term stability, Germany should not only focus on exports, but also strengthen its own domestic market. more

Jens Beckert more

Arianna Tassinari more

Düzgün Arslantaş more

Lucio Baccaro, Björn Bremer, Erik Neimanns more

Institutstag 2024 more

Institutstag 2024 more

Institutstag 2024 more

Institutstag 2024 more

Institutstag 2024 more

The main cause of the climate crisis is the burning of fossil fuels. This talk will turn the question around and aim at identifying the social problems that were meant to be solved by burning fossil fuels, looking in particular at critical junctures in human history. more

What is trust and how should it be studied? In his talk, Gil Eyal argues against conventional approaches to studying trust in the social sciences and proposes an alternate strategy focused on “trust methods.” Instead of treating trust as a static property that can be measured by close-format survey questions, he conceptualizes trusting as a skillful act that is highly context-dependent and attuned to temporal variables such as speed, duration sequence, and timing. To illustrate this approach, Eyal draws on interviews with long Covid patients focusing on how they account for who, what, when, and how they distinguish responsible trust from blind faith. more

We live in an age of migration, and of migration control. Global mobility and the political responses it has engendered have impelled governments in many countries to strengthen border policing and crack down on unauthorized migrants. These practices offer a vantage point for analyzing the development and operation of state power. In her talk, Kimberly Morgen will discuss the extensive buildup of border policing and immigration enforcement in the United States since the start of the 2000s as an example of state expansion. She will analyze how and why governing power has been mobilized and deployed in this way, and what larger ramifications this has for how we theorize and study states. more

In his talk, Michael A. Wilkinson reflects on postwar Europe from the perspective of the long durée of European constitutional history and the interwar breakdown of liberal democracy. He suggests that far from “revolutionary,” as it has been characterized, postwar European constitutionalism is better understood as elitist and even counter-revolutionary in trajectory. more

The lecture will explain how rating agencies award sovereign ratings; why they impose penalties on certain political and policy choices; why they are in a position to interfere with politics and policy in the first place; and why it is unlikely that these unelected, unappointed, unaccountable profit-seeking institutions would be stripped of their power, which rivals that of institutions at the peak of global governance, like the IMF or the World Bank. more