Hanna Pfeifer

Hanna Pfeifer has been the Head of the Research Area Societal Peace and Internal Security since 2024. Previously, she was a W1 Professor of Political Science with a focus on Radicalization and Violence Research at Goethe University Frankfurt and at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF). She was a guest professor at EHESS in Paris and the Catholic University in Erbil, as well as a DFG (German Research Foundation) Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge. She earned her PhD in 2017 at the Helmut Schmidt University / University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg (HSU) and was a doctoral fellow at the Orient Institute Beirut and the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes). As a research associate, she worked at HSU, the University of Magdeburg, and the Munich School of Philosophy.

Hanna Pfeifer researches domestic and international dynamics of order and violence. She works at the intersection of political science research on violence/conflict, international relations, and the area studies on West Asia and North Africa (WANA). Her core expertise is ordering practices and discourses by Islamist and jihadist actors in the WANA region. She is currently pursuing a project on order-building by state and non-state actors in Iraq under conditions of civil war and political violence. Since 2022, she has also been co-leading a DFG research project with Anna Geis (HSU) on democratic innovations in foreign and security policy. Her most recent research area is conflict dynamics in Germany, as they have developed since the escalation of the Israel-Palestine conflict in 2023, including war discourses, protest camps, and mobilization in foreign policy. She is an elected member of the Junge Akademie and the Arab-German Young Academy (AGYA).