Prof. Dr. Solveig Richter

Short Biography

Prof. Dr. Solveig Richter joined the Willy Brandt School as Junior Professor for International Conflict Management in January 2013. Her focus lied on external democracy promotion in post-conflict and transition societies, post-conflict peacebuilding, the role of international organizations, esp. the European Union, and on the effectiveness of instruments of civil crisis and conflict management. She has a regional expertise on Eastern Europe, the Western Balkan countries, and Colombia. Since October 1, 2020, Prof. Dr. Solveig Richter holds the Heisenberg Professorship for International Relations and Transnational Politics at the Leipzig University.

Before coming to Erfurt, Solveig Richter worked as a senior research associate at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs/Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik Berlin (SWP), in the research division EU External Relations. There she primarily concentrated on EU enlargement policy and political transition in South Eastern Europe and on the European security architecture. Solveig Richter studied political science, history and science of communication in Dresden and Strasbourg. She conducted research for her PhD at the University of Technology Dresden and the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy in Hamburg (IFSH). In her dissertation she examined the effectiveness of the OSCE’s democratization policy in Croatia, Bosnia and Hercegovina and Serbia. Solveig Richter also spent some months at the OSCE Mission to Croatia in Zagreb as Carlo-Schmid-Fellow of the German Academic Exchange Service. She is a trained international election observer. During her professional career, she also worked as lecturer, journalist and political consultant. Since January 2019, she is co-editor of the Zeitschrift für Friedens- und Konfliktforschung (ZeFKo), the most important journal in the field of peace and conflict studies in the German-speaking area. She is also the coordinator of the Brandt School as associate member in the German-Colombian Peace Institute CAPAZ.