Dr. Delf Rothe

Delf Rothe is a senior researcher at IFSH and a member of the sub-project B3 “Conflict and Cooperation at the Climate–Security Nexus” of the CliCCS Cluster of Excellence at Universität Hamburg. From April 2018 until November 2021 Delf Rothe was the principal investigator of the project: “The Knowledge Politics of Security in the Anthropocene” funded by the German Research Foundation. From 2014-2016, he was a member of the interdisciplinary postdoc-group “sustainable futures” at the University of Hamburg conducting a research project on the rise of resilience as a novel concept in security governance. Prior to joining IFSH, Rothe worked as a research fellow at the Institute of International Politics (Prof. Dr. Annette Jünemann) of the Helmut-Schmidt-University Hamburg for several years. Delf Rothe received his PhD (Dr. Phil) from the University of Hamburg with a dissertation thesis on the securitization of climate change and its political implications. In 2012, he joined Prof. Dr. Marieke de Goede’s “European Security Culture” project at the University of Amsterdam as a visiting scholar for three months. From November 2014-April 2015, he was a postdoc fellow at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) by invitation of Prof. Dr. Ronnie Lipschutz.

In his research Delf Rothe focuses on the security implications of global climate change. In his current project, he investigates the methods and practices involved in the production and circulation of knowledge on future environmental risks. In particular, he focuses on satellite-based remote sensing and the risk of a technology-driven securitization of the environment. A second focus is resilience as a novel paradigm in Western security policy. In the field of environmental security, Western practitioners increasingly seek to enhance the adaptive capacities and the self-help potential of vulnerable communities – in short: their resilience. Rothe searches for the reasons behind this paradigmatic shift and traces the knowledge practices involved in resilience-promotion projects.

Publications