About

JonasHagmann I am the Head of the Division for Police Sciences, at the Department of Justice and Security of the Canton of Basel-Stadt.

My work focuses on (inter-)national security politics and urban policing, democratic experimentalism in security and foreign affairs, and the so-called worlding of security theories and International Relations. My works draw on qualitative data, global and local fieldwork and soft-quantitative methods. It is grounded in (reflexive) International Relations, (critical) Urban Studies and Comparative Politics. My ambition is to foster nuanced understandings of how security narratives and democratic politics interrelate, and to consequently combine state-of-the-art social science theorizing with in-depth empirical research.

My current works focus on emergent practices of professional police work, the reconfiguration of urban security dispositives and competing security concepts at the UN Security Council. At the Division for Police Sciences, I analyze current challenges to Swiss police organisations and the complex inter-scalar governance of domestic security. Based on fieldwork in Basel, Bern, Zürich, Marrakech, Kathmandu, Cape Town and Montevideo, I sketch out how expanding urban security dispositives interact with local democratic processes and aspirations. By means of corpus linguistics methods, I address how new scales – such as cities – become matters of international peace and security (visit UNSCdeb8).

I conducted research in France, Germany, Morocco, Nepal, South Africa, Switzerland and Uruguay, co-founded the Swiss Political Science Association’s International Political Sociology Working Group, and teach or taught PhD, MA, BA and CAS lecture courses, seminars and modules in International Relations, Political Science and Police Studies at IHEID Geneva, ETH Zurich, the Universities of Lucerne, Lausanne and Fribourg, the University of Applied Sciences of Northwestern Switzerland, The New School (New York), Université de Marrakech and Tribhuvan University (Kathmandu). I also provide scientific advisory work, such as for Fondation Botnar, the Swiss Arts Council, the Swiss Federal Government or ETH Zürich’s Future Cities Lab Global. I received the University of Geneva’s Best of Class Distinction in International Relations, the Fletcher School’s Donald R. MacJannet Fellowship and IHEID Geneva’s Best PhD Thesis of the Institute Award.

In the past, I was a Senior Researcher at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Geneva, a Swiss National Science Foundation Ambizione Research Group Leader and Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Science, Technology and Policy, ETH Zürich, and a Senior Researcher and Lecturer at the Center for Security Studies, also ETH Zürich. I held Visiting Professor and Visiting Scholar positions at The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Universidad de la República in Montevideo, University of Amsterdam, Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu, Université Cadi Ayyad in Marrakech, University of Cambridge, Sciences Po Paris, Columbia University, The New School for Social Research in New York and University of Copenhagen. I obtained my doctorate in International Relations (Political Science) from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. I hold an MA in Law and Diplomacy and a Human Security Certificate from The Fletcher School in Boston, and an MA in International Relations from the Graduate Institute in Geneva.