Center for International and Regional Studies

CIRS welcomed Katja Niethammer as its inaugural Post Doctoral Fellow for the 2008-2009 academic year. During her Fellowship spent within the framework of CIRS research and scholarship initiatives, Niethammer was involved in three major projects.

In the first project, Niethammer helped initiate a year-long examination of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries’ domestic and foreign policies. Niethammer looks into the interrelations between domestic political reforms and foreign policies in the Gulf states. She examines the recent initiatives for political reform, all of which have involved some kind of elections—ranging from indirect, partial, elections in the UAE, to municipal elections in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, and quite meaningful parliamentary elections in Kuwait. Her initial inquiries have shown that it seems highly unlikely that these representative bodies will substantially influence, let alone shape, these states’ policies towards important international issues involving the United States or Iran.

In the second project, Niethammer devoted time to the topic of political reform and towards turning her Ph.D. dissertation entitled “The King’s Democracy: Institutional Transformation, Conflicts of Identities, and Discourses on Democracy in Bahrain's Reform Process,” into a book. Niethammer was awarded a publishing contract by Routlege and the forthcoming book entitled Political Reform in Bahrain: Institutional Transformation, Identity Conflict and Democracy is to be published in 2009. The book examines the reasons for the apparent failure of Bahrain’s initially ambitious reform project to achieve a substantial redistribution of political decision-making powers. While the authoritarian rulers’ vested interest in keeping a firm grip on their polities and institutional and legislative mismatches do play important roles in the persistence of the authoritarian status quo, the book will identify reasons beyond these. As such, the research traces the ways in which historical legacies of identity politics and past confessional conflicts continue to obstruct meaningful political progress.
A third project Niethammer will work on is the role Qatar and Saudi Arabia play in regional conflict mediation. While the kingdom has been actively involved in regional conflicts for some time, Qatar’s new diplomatic activism is striking—and somewhat counter-intuitive of realist assumptions about small states’ foreign policy behavior. In a joint project with CIRS Director, Mehran Kamrava, Niethammer studies Qatar and Saudi Arabia’s divergent motivations for engaging in regional conflict mediation, their capabilities to follow-up on, and to implement their initiatives in a sustainable fashion and the consequences this has for other external actors active in conflict mediation in the Middle East, especially the United States and the European Union.

After having served her fellowship at CIRS for the 2008-2009 academic year, Niethammer took up a new position as Director of the Institute for Islamic Studies at Hamburg University where she is a professor in Islamic Studies.

View Katja Niethammer's Bio