The six-year research project is dedicated to a little-studied but highly topical issue in global politics: African agency and the role of regional organisations such as the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA). The project aims to create an understanding of how African RECs perceive the key challenges of our time, how they frame them and how they attempt to develop and implement concrete solutions. This understanding forms an important basis for cooperative political action across national and regional borders. The focus is on four key global policy areas that both African and other international stakeholders consider crucial for regional and international cooperation: migration, climate change, health and energy.
Professor Jens Eilers, Vice-Rector for Excellence Development at Leipzig University, comments on the successful application: “I congratulate Jens Herpolsheimer on this great success. His Emmy Noether Junior Research Group is an important building block for the further development of the strategic research field ‘Changing Orders in a Globalised World’. I am particularly pleased that Mr Herpolsheimer, as a long-standing member of our Graduate School Global and Area Studies, has been able to acquire such prominent funding from the DFG. This shows that the strategic promotion of our early career researchers is bearing fruit in the long term.”
An interview in German with Jens Herpolsheimer about his new research group can be found here.
