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On December 12-14, the QCA Paper Development Workshop and the QCA Expert Workshop took place in Antwerp at the Antwerp Management School (AMS), hosted by Bart Cambré (AMS) and Benoît Rihoux (UCLouvain) and the co-organizers of the Paper Development Workshop Julia Leib (Uni Leipzig), Christoph Niessen (Universiteit Leiden), and Christian Rupietta (Queen’s University Belfast). The workshops brought together a group of about 50 experts and practitioners from around the globe to discuss methodological innovations and empirical applications. Together with Benoît Rihoux, I co-chaired a paper development roundtable, where we discussed and commented upon four empirical applications.

Politics and Governance published the open access article “Zeitenwende: German Foreign Policy Change in the Wake of Russia’s War Against Ukraine” as an ahead-of-print. In the article, I examine the foreign and security policy of the German ‘traffic-light’ coalition under Chancellor Scholz to assess whether and to which extent the Russian aggression against Ukraine has marked an international orientation change in German foreign and security policy (see abstract below). The article is part of a forthcoming special issue “From Kabul to Kyiv: The Crisis of Liberal Interventionism and the Return of War”, co-edited by Cornelia Baciu (University of Copenhagen), Falk Ostermann (Kiel University), and Wolfgang Wagner (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) and based on an authors’ workshop at the University of Copenhagen.

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Abstract: Russia’s war against Ukraine has severely damaged the European security architecture. This article examines the consequences of this rupture for German foreign and security policy. Just a few months before Russia’s full‐scale invasion of Ukraine, Germany saw the transition to an unprecedented three‐party coalition government of Social Democrats, Greens, and Liberals. In a special address to the Bundestag three days after the invasion, Chancellor Olaf Scholz described Russia’s war initiation as a historical Zeitenwende (“watershed”) that called into question long‐held beliefs about European security. In the wake of this, Scholz proclaimed far‐reaching changes, including the announcement that military expenditure would be drastically increased, additional military capabilities would be procured, and new deployments would be committed to NATO’s eastern flank. This article argues that the Zeitenwende amounts to an international orientation change in German foreign and security policy. Apart from identifying areas of significant change, the article also documents political contestation over the Zeitenwende’s nature and extent as well as gaps between proclaimed changes and actual implementation.

Am 12./13. Oktober habe ich an der Universität des Saarlandes in Saarbrücken einen QCA-Workshop für das CEUS-Nachwuchskolleg am Cluster für Europaforschung gehalten. In dem kompakten zweitägigen Format wurden die Grundlagen von QCA auf Basis von Qualitative Comparative Analysis: An Introduction to Research Design and Application erörtert, Anwendungsbeispiele besprochen und die Anwendung der Software anhand des kürzlich aktualisierten R Manual for QCA vorgestellt. Herzlichen Dank an Prof. Dr. Georg Wenzelburger und das Team der Professur für Politikwissenschaft mit Schwerpunkt komparative Europaforschung sowie an Dr. Florian Rossbach, Koordinator des Nachwuchskollegs Europa, für die Einladung nach Saarbrücken und an alle Teilnehmenden für den konstruktiven Workshop!

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The R Manual for QCA has been updated to version 3.0. Among other changes and updates, the current version includes further guidance on forming different types of intermediate solutions and on visualizing QCA results, particularly on how to create suitable XY plots and how to customize them in line with one’s own research aims. The R Manual for QCA (PDF file, R Script, and sample data) can be downloaded on this website and on Harvard Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/KYF7VJ.

The R Manual for QCA is freely available as an online appendix to Qualitative Comparative Analysis: An Introduction to Research Design and Application (Georgetown University Press, 2021).

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I reviewed Richard Ned Lebow’s The Quest for Knowledge in International Relations: How Do We Know? (Cambridge University Press, 2022) for the latest issue of Political Science Quarterly. The book review is available here.

From the review: “In his book The Quest for Knowledge in International Relations, Richard Ned Lebow addresses foundational questions about the academic enterprise of international relations (IR). What counts as knowledge in the discipline? By which methods and approaches can it be pursued? And on which grounds can knowledge claims be made? These overarching questions structure Lebow’s survey, while the topics of individual chapters are approached from the divide between positivism and interpretivism. […]

Quest for Knowledge makes a plea for more conscious reflection upon questions of epistemology and the premises upon which our methodologies and methods rest. The book also acknowledges the diversity of approaches in IR, under the broad tents of positivism and interpretivism. As Lebow argues, the categories of positivism and interpretivism “do not exhaust the ways in which we can frame and seek knowledge but do capture nicely the dominant research traditions in international relations” (221). This resonates with a similar argument by Gary Goertz and James Mahoney, put forth in A Tale of Two Cultures, namely that empirical studies in the social sciences can be separated into quantitative and qualitative methodological cultures. However, as David Kuehn and Ingo Rohlfing have shown in a pilot study, methods practices could not be neatly classified into two cultures and, especially, qualitative research showed much more diversity than the common label suggests.

Although one may question whether the binary distinction between positivism and interpretivism accurately portrays the field of IR, this does not diminish the substantial contribution of Lebow’s book, which should be essential reading for doctoral students and more senior researchers alike. The Quest for Knowledge successfully lifts the scaffolding of IR research to interrogate what is often relegated to the sidelines or not discussed at all in books on research design and methods. Lebow disentangles prevailing conceptions of “cause” and he keenly identifies the analytical dilemmas that are inherent in the main research approaches. The discussion of four research strategies on how to deal with the challenges of causal analysis (190–97) is particularly enlightening.”

During the week of August 21-25, I returned to Lugano to teach the QCA workshop at the 27th Summer School in Social Science Methods at the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI). Since 2016, I have been teaching this workshop at USI. The intensive course covers the foundations and advanced uses of QCA and its application in R, based on my book Qualitative Comparative Analysis: An Introduction to Research Design and Application (Georgetown University Press, 2021) and the accompanying R Manual (R Script and PDF freely available here). Workshop sessions are split into lectures and exercises, with dedicated time for individual consultation and feedback (see also the course description on the USI website). For impressions from previous years, see here. Thanks to the team at USI for the smooth organization and to all participants for the constructive sessions!

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I contributed to an H-Diplo Roundtable Review in the Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum, reviewing the book African Interventions: State Militaries, Foreign Powers and Rebel Forces (Cambridge University Press, 2022) by Emizet F. Kisangani and Jeffrey Pickering (both Kansas State University). The roundtable was organized by Frank Gerits (Utrecht University) and further included contributions from Seung-Whan Choi (University of Illinois at Chicago), Benjamin Fordham (Binghamton University, SUNY), and Dennis Foster (Virginia Military Institute), as well as a response from the book’s authors. The PDF can be directly accessed here.

On July 12-14, 2023, the 10th European Workshops in International Studies (EWIS) took place in Amsterdam. I participated in the Workshop on “Systemic Transformation and National Role Conceptions: The Domestic Politics of Deconstructing and Redefining ‘the West’”, convened by Angelos Chryssogelos (London Metropolitan University) and Toby Greene (Bar Ilan University). During the workshop, I presented a paper on “The Party Politics of National Role Contestation: Germany’s ‘Traffic Light’ Coalition and the Russian War against Ukraine”.

On July 11, 2023, I took part in the kick-off workshop of Wolfgang Wagner’s project on the “Party-Political Contestation of the Liberal International Order”, funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and organized at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. The workshop opened with a keynote address from Stephanie Hofmann (European University Institute) on “Global Politics, Democratic States, and Political Parties, Avenues for Research”. This was followed by two panels with presentations from PhD researchers (Baris Ertürk, Sungmi Shin, Richard Sonneveld, Martina Stankova, Christina Stremming, and Vanessa Vohs) and a host of expert discussants. Together with Atsushi Tago (Waseda University), I served as discussant for Sungmi Shin’s PhD research proposal on “Foreign Policy Space of Party Politics in South Korea and Japan”.

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Im Rahmen der IB-Sektionstagung an der Zeppelin Universität in Friedrichshafen fand am 16. Juni 2023 die hybride Mitgliederversammlung der DVPW-Themengruppe Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik statt. Anschließend an den Bericht des bisherigen SprecherInnen-Teams über Aktivitäten und Publikationen der Themengruppe und Neuigkeiten aus dem Rat der DVPW wurde ein neues SprecherInnen-Team gewählt.

Neben anderen Publikationen ist besonders auf das kürzlich erschienene Routledge Handbook of Foreign Policy Analysis Methods (2023) hinzuweisen, dessen Konzeption mit einem durch die Themengruppe ausgerichteten Workshop an der Universität Erfurt im Herbst 2019 begann und zu dessen 34 Kapiteln neben internationalen Beitragenden auch viele Mitglieder der Themengruppe beigesteuert haben.

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Seit Januar 2021 hat die Themengruppe 14 “virtuelle Kolloquien” organisiert (siehe Folie), wobei jeweils ein aktuelles Paper zu außenpolitischen Fragen diskutiert wurde.Wir freuen uns darüber, wie erfolgreich die Idee des virtuellen Kolloquiums der Themengruppe aufgenommen wurde und bedanken uns bei all den Kolleginnen und Kollegen, die uns seither mit Beiträgen und als Discussant unterstützt haben.

Seit einigen Jahren ist es möglich, sich innerhalb der DVPW einzelnen Gliederungen zuzuordnen. Aktuell haben sich 119 Personen der Themengruppe Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik zugeordnet, was einen Zuwachs um 20% (seit 2021) bedeutet. Neben einem Twitter-Account (@dvpw_aussenpol) betreibt die Themengruppe auch eine Mailingliste (Anmeldung). Wir freuen uns sehr über die breite Unterstützung und das Interesse an der Arbeit der Themengruppe.

Nach zwei Amtszeiten in der Themengruppe (2017 bis 2023) haben Gordon Friedrichs (Freiburg) und ich turnusgemäß nicht mehr für das SprecherInnen-Team kandidiert. Sabine Mokry (Hamburg) und Falk Ostermann (Kiel) wurden für eine zweite Amtszeit gemeinsam mit Florian Böller (Kaiserslautern), Stephan Fouquet (Eichstätt) und Antje Nötzold (Chemnitz) gewählt.

Ich wünsche dem neuen Team viel Erfolg für die anstehende Arbeit und die kommenden Aktivitäten! Es war mir eine Freude, zusammen mit Sabine Mokry, Gordon Friedrichs und Falk Ostermann (und zuvor mit Sandra Destradi und Klaus Brummer) die Geschicke der Themengruppe zu leiten.

Vom 14. bis 16. Juni 2023 fand die Tagung der DVPW-Sektion Internationale Beziehungen an der Zeppelin Universität in Friedrichshafen am Bodensee statt (Programm), organisiert durch das Team des Lehrstuhls für Internationale Sicherheitspolitik von Simon Koschut. Im Panel “die Krise des liberalen Interventionismus und die Rückkehr von Krieg in Europa” habe ich ein Paper zur Zeitenwende in der deutschen Sicherheitspolitik vorgestellt (Chair: Elke Krahmann, Discussant: Anna Geis), mit weiteren Beiträgen von Cornelia Baciu, Falk Ostermann, Wolfgang Wagner, Florian Böller und Georg Wenzelburger. Zudem war ich Discussant im Panel “Studying the Rusian-Ukrainian War: Local, Regional, and Global Implications”, mit Thomas Risse als Chair und Beiträgen von Gerald Schneider, Alessia Invernizzi, Olena Osypenkova und Tim Büthe.

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Between May 20-28, I was part of an interdisciplinary delegation of researchers and international office staff from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam to visit Japanese research institutions, to foster new collaborations, and to reconnect with local partners. Apart from many individual meetings, we collectively visited the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), Keio University, Waseda University, and took part in an event and roundtable discussion at the Embassy of the Netherlands in Tokyo, where we also met with alumni from the Vrije Universiteit. The interdisciplinary delegation comprised 24 members from five faculties of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

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On May 24, I was invited to give a guest lecture at the Faculty of Political Science and Economics of Waseda University in Atushi Tago‘s undergraduate course on International Relations. I presented findings from a working paper “Zeitenwende: German Security Policy in the Wake of the Afghanistan Withdrawal and Russia’s War against Ukraine”, and related these to current developments in Japan. Many thanks to the students for their intriguing questions after the talk and to Atsushi Tago for hosting me at Waseda University!

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The Japanese academic publisher Chikura Shobo has acquired the rights to translate Qualitative Comparative Analysis: An Introduction to Research Design and Application (Georgetown University Press, 2021) into Japanese. The Japanese edition will be published in late 2023/early 2024. The translator is Professor Nobukazu Azuma of Aoyama Gakuin University. On May 23, I met with him in the offices of Chikura Shobo in Tokyo.

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On May 22, I gave a QCA workshop at Waseda University in Tokyo, hosted by and co-organized with Airo Hino at the Institute of Political Economy of the Faculty of Political Science and Economics, and Sho Niikawa of Kobe University. During the workshop, which was conducted in hybrid format, I gave a talk on “Recent Advances and Trends in Qualitative Comparative Analysis”, including a discussion of combining process tracing and QCA (based on work co-authored with Hilde van Meegdenburg of Leiden University). This was followed by a broader discussion with the participants, and paper presentations on recent QCA applications by Masaki Unohara (Kobe University) and Sho Niikawa (Kobe University), and Ruifei Wang (Kobe University). Many thanks to all participants (in-presence and online) and to Airo Hino for hosting this workshop at Waseda University!

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On March 28-29, I gave an applied workshop on Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) at the Center for Comparative Research on Democracy at the Department of Social Sciences of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. The workshop was tailored for researchers of the project “Judicial Autonomy under Authoritarian Attack”, led by Prof. Dr. Silvia von Steinsdorff, and funded by the Einstein Foundation Berlin. The two-day workshop followed up on a virtual preparatory session to provide a comprehensive introduction to the method and approach of QCA and its application in the R software environment, based on my book Qualitative Comparative Analysis: An Introduction to Research Design and Application (Georgetown University Press) and the accompanying R Manual. Particular emphasis was placed on finding a suitable QCA research design in line with the broader aims of the project. Many thanks to the whole project team for the warm welcome in Berlin and the engaged and constructive discussions!

On March 15-18, 2023, the 64th Annual Convention of the International Studies Association took place Montréal, Canada. I had four program appearances. First, I co-chaired a roundtable (with Falk Ostermann, Kiel University) on our recently published Routledge Handbook of Foreign Policy Analysis Methods, with contributions from panelists (and contributors to our handbook) Marijke Breuning (University of North Texas), Simon Koschut (Zeppelin University), Sibel Oktay (University of Illinois at Springfield), Hilde van Meegdenburg (Leiden University), and discussant Susan Hannah Allen (University of Mississippi). I further presented a paper on the German Zeitenwende in Foreign and Security Policy in a panel on “The Crisis of Liberal Interventionism”, organized by Cornelia Bacius (University of Copenhagen), with discussant Sibel Oktay and chaired by Brian Rathbun (University of Southern California). I also co-chaired the Foreign Policy Analysis Methods Café (with Marijke Breuning and Falk Ostermann), where I introduced and discussed Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), at one of 7 expert tables in the methods café. Finally, I served as chair and discussant in a panel on “Foreign Influence in the Middle East and North Africa”, with contributions from Nikolaos Lampas (Deree, The American College of Greece), Ora Szekely (Clark University), and Cindy May (London School of Economics and Political Science). Besides these panels, I also took part in the Editorial Board meeting of Foreign Policy Analysis and the FPA Section‘s business meeting, where I had served on the book award committee, together with Sibel Oktay and chaired by Dursun Peksen (Memphis University). Last but not least, we had our traditional “early-bird” Friday 7:15am meeting of the German Political Science Association’s (DVPW) group on foreign and security policy, together with Gordon Friedrichs (University of Freiburg) and Falk Ostermann. We were happy about a nice and diverse turnout of colleagues, despite the early time.

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This summer I’ll be offering a workshop on Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), as part of the Summer School in Social Science Methods at the Università della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano. This will be the 5th time that I’m holding a QCA workshop in Lugano (on previous courses, see here). The workshop runs for a full week and covers the entire research design cycle of QCA with R and its packages, including the application and interpretation of findings and advanced topics such as multi-method research, addressing critiques and peer reviews, and increasing the robustness of one’s study. There are also opportunities for the presentation of own work and individual consultation on QCA research design. The workshop is based on my textbook Qualitative Comparative Analysis: An Introduction to Research Design and Application, published with Georgetown University Press (2021), see also the online content hosted on Harvard Dataverse. In case you’re interested in participating in this workshop but have questions about it, please feel free to contact me.

Edited by Patrick A. Mello and Falk Ostermann

On December 26, the Routledge Handbook of Foreign Policy Analysis Methods was published (co-edited with Falk Ostermann, Kiel University). The handbook contains 34 chapters and a foreword from 46 international contributors, covering a diverse range of new and established methods of Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA). Embracing methodological pluralism and a belief in the value of an open discussion about methods’ assumptions and diverging positions, it provides new, state-of-the-art research approaches, as well as introductions to a range of established methods. Each chapter follows the same structured approach, introducing the method and its development, discussing strengths, requirements, limitations, and potential pitfalls while illustrating the method’s application using examples from empirical research. For more information on the book, including an excerpt from the foreword by Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and book endorsements from Charles F. Hermann, Margaret G. Hermann, Stéphanie Hofmann, Juliet Kaarbo, and Atsushi Tago, please see this page.