Thomas Risse

Prof. Dr. Thomas Risse is director of the Center for Transnational Relations, Foreign and Security Policy at the Otto-Suhr- Institute of Political Science at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Risse is co-ordinator of the Research Center 700 "Governance in Areas of Limited Statehood", funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Kolleg-Forschergruppe "The Transformative Power of Europe". He is founding director of the Berlin Graduate School for Transnational Studies, and has been chair of the Executive Committee of the Joint Master program in International Relations of the Freie Universität Berlin, the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, and the University of Potsdam. He is chairman of the Social Science Committees Science Europe, the association of European Research Funding Organisations (RFO) and Research Performing Organisations (RPO), based in Brussels. He has been associate editor of the Journal International Organization. In 2003, he received the Max Planck Research Prize for International Cooperation.

Thomas Risse is the author of A Community of Europeans. Transnational Identities and Public Spheres(Cornell University Press, 2010) and Cooperation among Democracies. The European Influence on U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton University Press, 1995) and among others, he is (co-)editor of the Oxford Handbook of Comparative Regionalism (Oxford University Press, 2016, with Tanja A. Börzel), European Public Spheres. Politics is Back (Cambridge University Press, 2015), “External Actors, State-Building, and Service Provision in Areas of Limited Statehood” (Special Issue of Governance, 2014, with Stephen Krasner), The Persistent Power of Human Rights (Cambridge University Press, 2013, with Stephen C. Ropp and Kathryn Sikkink), Handbook of International Relations (Sage, 2002/2012, with Walter Carlsnaes and Beth Simmons), and  Governance Without a State? Policies and Politics in Areas of Limited Statehood (Columbia University Press, 2011).

He received his PhD from the University of Frankfurt in 1987. From 1997-2001, he was Joint Chair of International Relations at the European University Institute's Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies and the Department of Social and Political Sciences in Florence, Italy. His previous teaching and research appointments include the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt, the University of Konstanz, as well as Cornell, Harvard, Yale and Stanford Universities, the University of Wyoming and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.