Viktoria Budde

Viktoria Budde is a PhD fellow and a consultant at the “Research and Transfer Center for Security Sector Reform (SSR Hub)” project funded by the Federal Foreign Office. From 2020-22, she was an SSR-Hub seconded researcher to the FFO’s Stabilisation Unit, where she advised on security sector governance projects. As a researcher, she worked on a project on the role of trust in international security cooperation. Viktoria Budde studied in Berlin, Salzburg and Milan and received an M.A. in European Union Studies. She worked as a teaching and research assistant at the Bocconi University in Milan on questions of comparative constitutional law. From 2017-19 she also worked at the Federal Foreign Office as a consultant for rule of law-projects as part of another knowledge transfer project.

In her academic work, Viktoria Budde mainly deals with the foreign and security policy instruments of international security sector assistance, security sector reform and the German so-called Enable and Enhance Initiative. Her focus is on democratic civilian control of the security sector, and governance aspects of international security assistance, as well as associated project design decisions. In her PhD thesis, Viktoria Budde examines which factors influenced the design of international assistance to the security sector in Lebanon. She is also interested in international assistance projects that support processes of dealing with the past and reconciliation (transitional justice).