Johanna Polle

Johanna Polle has been a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Hamburg, supervised by Prof. Dr. Michael Brzoska, since December 2017. She holds a scholarship from the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. Johanna Polle received a Master of Philosophy in International Relations from the University of Oxford in 2016, where she was a member of St Antony’s College. Previously, she studied Political Science in Göttingen, Milan, and Hamburg. In the academic year 2018/2019, Johanna Polle spent one semester as a visiting researcher at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs (NPSIA) at the Carleton University, Canada. She was a researcher at the IFSH for three years. From fall 2020 until the 2021 election she worked as a research associate at the German Bundestag. Since summer 2022, she has been working as a foreign policy advisor at the German Parliament for the Study Commission on Afghanistan.

Johanna Polle’s work focuses on the changing character of warfare and arms dynamics. She is interested in questions regarding emerging technologies and arms control, especially unmanned military systems, the proliferation of military drones in Europe and North America, and future lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS). As a political scientist, Johanna Polle is also contributing to theoretical debates on discourse analysis and international security norms. In her PhD dissertation, supervised by Prof. Michael Brzoska and Prof. Elvira Rosert, she analyzes the German parliamentary debate on military drone policy. Johanna Polle is a member of the "Transatlantic Cyber ​​Forum" (TCF), organized by the Stiftung Neue Verantwortung. In this intersectional expert network, she contributes to the working group on IT security and machine learning.

Publications