Christian Marks

Christian has studied Political Science, International Relations, and Law during his BA at Bielefeld University and during his MA at Free University of Berlin which he completed with a thesis similar to his PhD project. He also studied Ethnography, IR, and security studies at the University of Copenhagen and Tel Aviv University; visited various summer schools across Europe; acquired research experience at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society in Berlin by assisting in various projects on AI, government, law, and politics; and worked for an NGO by co-curating their networks to promote STEM education among children.

His PhD project attends to ‘the future’ as a neglected concept in the nevertheless future-oriented discipline of IR. It reads for how central and more marginal authors have analyzed, evaluated, and intervened in their audience’s visionary capacity to imagine and act on the right kind of future, as viewed from these author’s reflections on their own visionary capacity. It is concerned with post-war political thought in view of a possible World War 3 and nuclear apocalypse; anti-colonial theories and respective intellectual work in anticipation of a post-colonial future under self-determination; as well as late Cold War international political theory centrally concerned with futural themes such as the seeming ‘closure of history’ and the simultaneous ‘multiplication of times’. In the course of this, he deploys an interpretive methodology and rationales taken from comparative political theory, to eventually embed some of his readings into future-oriented discussions in contemporary IR to which this thesis is connected via his own futural horizon and historical perspective. This concluding part makes use of relational interviews with experts, scholars, and intellectuals concerned with a defined set of contemporary debates in IR and beyond. To learn more about his work, feel free to reach out and visit his project website at irvisions.cargo.site.

 

Primary Supervisor: Professor Christoph Meyer