Jonas Hagmann

JonasHagmann I am the Head of Divison, Police Sciences, at the Department of Justice and Security of the Canton of Basel-Stadt, and a Visiting Lecturer in International Security Studies at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID) in Geneva. I am also an Associated Researcher at the University of Copenhagen, the University of Cambridge and the University of Geneva.

My research, teaching and advisory work focuses on the relations between democracy and national and urban security politics, democratic experimentalism in international institutions, and the development of a more globally representative IR discipline. My work draws on qualitative data, international fieldwork and soft-quantitative methods, and is grounded in (reflexive) International Relations, Urban Studies and Comparative Politics. My ambition is to develop 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 two work-streams focus on the reconfiguration of urban security dispositives and the redistribution of discursive power within the UN Security Council: Based on fieldwork in the cities of Basel, Bern, Zürich, Marrakech, Kathmandu, Cape Town and Montevideo, I analyze how expanding urban security dispositives interact with local democratic processes and aspirations. In parallel, I work on making UN Security Council debates amendable to mixed-method, seach-engine-assisted corpus linguistics research. By doing so, I analyse how new scales – such as the urban – become conceived as 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 BA, MA and PhD modules, seminars and lecture courses in International Relations at IHEID Geneva, ETH Zurich, the Universities of Lucerne, Lausanne and Fribourg, The New School (New York), Université de Marrakech and Tribhuvan University (Kathmandu). I actively engage in scientific advisory work, such as for Fondation Botnar, the Swiss Arts Council, the Swiss Federal Government or ETH Zürich’s Future Cities Lab Global. My work 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 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 from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva and hold MA degrees in International Relations from both The Fletcher School in Boston and the Graduate Institute in Geneva.