Oliver Merschel

Since January 2024, Oliver Merschel is PhD Fellow at IFSH. From February 2021 until December 2023, he worked at the IFSH as researcher. He was part of the project "Cohesion through security? Discourses, interactions and practices of European cohesion in the field of security" (ZUSE) which is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. Prior to that, he studied political science with a special focus on International Relations in Hamburg and Aarhus. He received the degrees Bachelor of Arts (2018) and Master of Arts (2020) from the University of Hamburg. During his studies, he furthermore worked between 2016 and 2019 as tutor and student assistant at the Chair of Antje Wiener (Political Science, especially Global Governance, University of Hamburg) as well as at the cluster of excellence “Climate, Climatic Change, and Society” (CLICCS).

As part of the ZUSE project, Oliver Merschel investigated how the overarching narrative of “security” shapes the organisation of coherence in and between European societies, how this narrative is fleshed out on different political and administrative levels and how it affects politics and society. His research profile is characterised by an interest in critical security studies, theories of International Relations (IR) as well as practice-oriented and interpretive methods of the social sciences.