Course Description: This course offers an introduction to the empirical study of the majority of political systems around the world. According to Freedom House, people live under unfree political conditions within 55 percent of countries worldwide and there has been a rising trend of declining political and civil rights within all regions of the world for more than a decade. More specifically, the course will highlight the following aspects: First, main elements of the definitions and measurement strategies used in current research on authoritarianism will be summarised. Second, a brief overview will introduce recent trends and developments in researching authoritarian regimes. And, third, examples of GIGA research from the work of scholars in the Research Team “Authoritarian Politics” will be introduced in order to illustrate some of the main research strategies used by GIGA scholars in this important field of comparative politics.

Date of Event: 28.05.2018

Location: GIGA, Neuer Jungfernstieg 21, 20354 Hamburg, Germany

Lecturer: Dr Thomas Richter is a Senior Research Fellow at the GIGA Institute of Middle East Studies.

Further Information and Registration (Deadline: 6 April 2018)

Course Description: This course aims to introduce doctoral students to the most widely used qualitative research technique – the interview. The course begins by outlining the sorts of research question that are best addressed through qualitative interviews, touching on debates about the nature of qualitative data. We then consider the practical considerations when undertaking a qualitative interview project – from selecting participants through to choosing a location in which to conduct the interview and the sorts of things you ought to take with you into the field. There will be a practical exercise on designing a qualitative interview guide, with a session devoted to how to avoid and recognise poorly worded interview questions. Attention will be focused on the key skills that qualitative interviewers need to collect good quality data (including body language, asking open questions, probing, prompting and active listening) and we will discuss the importance of critical reflexivity throughout the research process. Participants will also be introduced to thematic analysis and shown how to undertake a basic analysis using the CAQDAS package, MAXQDA.

The course is primarily aimed at two groups of doctoral students; those who are at the beginning of their qualitative research projects and want to deepen their knowledge of the qualitative interview; and those who have never used qualitative methods and want an introduction to one of main data collection tools used within this approach.

Date of Event: 17.-18.05.2018

Location: GIGA, Neuer Jungfernstieg 21, 20354 Hamburg, Germany

Lecturer: Dr Katy Wheeler is a Lecturer in Sociology at The University of Essex. She has extensive experience of conducting qualitative interviews with a range of different participants from industry experts through to household interviews. Her research interests are in the fields of sustainability and ethical consumption. She is also an instructor at the Essex Summer School in Social Science Data Analysis, where she co-runs a course on qualitative interviewing.

Further Information and Registration (Deadline: 6 April 2018)

Course Description: There is by now a broad consensus among scholars of Latin American regionalism (and other regionalisms) not to take the EU as the gold standard for regional integration and cooperation. The focus on Europe and Europe-focused integration theories led to into a blind alley. In the course, we will discuss why this has been the case. But while the Euro crisis and the Brexit had negative repercussions for the EU, they might improve the options for comparative regionalism by adding the study of regional disintegration to the study of regional integration. So once again one might ask and discuss which tools and analytical approaches developed in EU studies might be applied to the study of Latin American regionalism.

Date of Event: 14.05.2018

Location: GIGA, Neuer Jungfernstieg 21, 20354 Hamburg, Germany

Lecturer: Prof Dr Detlef Nolte is Director of the GIGA Institute of Latin American Studies.

Further Information and Registration (Deadline: 6 April 2018)

Course Description: Process Tracing (PT) is a within-case method that focuses on tracing causal mechanisms – the actual ‘link’ between a trigger (X) and an outcome (Y). This workshop will introduce you to the essentials of this method, its main underlying assumptions and its applicability. We will discuss what causal mechanisms are, how we can ‘trace’ them and what kind of causal inferences we can draw on the bases of a process-tracing study. Moreover, to position PT in the broader methodological field we will look at how PT relates to, but differs from, other (larger- and small-N) case study methods and discuss what understanding of causality underlies process-tracing. This introduction to PT will take a hands-on approach applying the new insights to concrete examples and to the participants’ research projects. The first day we will cover most methodological ground and theoretical debates, the second day is largely reserved for debating practical questions and applicability by means of discussing some of the participants’ own research and applications of PT.

Date of Event: 08.-09.05.2018

Location: GIGA, Neuer Jungfernstieg 21, 20354 Hamburg, Germany

Lecturer: Dr Hilde van Meegdenburg is a postdoctoral research fellow at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich & Technical University Munich.

Further Information and Registration (Deadline: 6 April 2018)

Course Description: This course presents a research strategy for the selection of comparative cases from different regions in the field of postwar security sector reform (SSR). Key elements are the demilitarization, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) of ex-combatants, reforms in the structure, mandate, accountability, and oversight of the armed forces and the police, as well as in some cases reforms in the justice sector (transitional justice, judiciary). SSR forms part of the standard procedures of international peacebuilding strategies as formulated in the OECD Handbook on Security Sector Reform. However, on the ground, these reforms are not only shaped and influenced by external support but also by the interaction with local conditions such as existing power relations and prior institutional designs. This course introduces to the research strategy we developed starting with three inductive case studies from three regions of the world (El Salvador, Uganda, Nepal) and a quantitative data collection on judiciary reforms for a broader set of postwar countries. The course will introduce into and discuss the challenges of case study selection and data collection.

Date of Event: 03.05.2018

Location: GIGA, Neuer Jungfernstieg 21, 20354 Hamburg, Germany

Lecturer: Dr Sabine Kurtenbach is a Senior Research Fellow at the GIGA Institute of Latin American Studies.

Further Information and Registration (Deadline: 6 April 2018)

Course Description: The aim of the course is threefold: First, the students are going to learn the basic differences between Bayesian and Frequentist statistics. Second, they should be able to identify research questions and ideas that might benefit from a Bayesian approach. Third, they should be able to understand research conducted under a Bayesian framework and how it might differ substantially from Frequentist approach (or whether there is actually no substantive difference).

Date of Event: 26.-27.04.2018

Location: GIGA, Neuer Jungfernstieg 21, 20354 Hamburg, Germany

Lecturer: Dr Hannes Kröger is Research Associate at German Institute for Economic Research (Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung/DIW) in Berlin.

Further Information and Registration (Deadline: 6 April 2018)