RESEARCH Timothy Williams

 

By training Timothy Williams is a comparative political scientist with a focus on violence and conflict. His work is comparative and is rooted in political sociology, but also touches other fields of sociology, social psychology, history and even some anthropology and criminology. His research focuses on:

  • Genocide and mass atrocity
  • Memory of past mass atrocities
  • Transitional Justice
  • Micro-level analysis of actors such as perpetrators, victims, etc.

 

Methodologically I primarily work with

  • Qualitative research methodologies, primarily also drawing on in-depth interviews in field research
  • Multi-method research (MMR) frameworks
  • Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA)

 

My regional expertise is primarily located in Southeast Asia, specifically Cambodia, the Philippines and Thailand, although I am also very interested in conflict processes in other parts of the world, especially Rwanda and the Balkans. Also the historical cases of the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide have received some attention in my work.

 

Research project and network: Discourses of Mass Violence in Comparative Perspective 

The project combines contemporary history, comparative literature, political science and Hebrew Bible studies to understand the transmission of discourses that justify mass violence across generations, eras, languages and cultures. The project hypothesizes that while justifications of acts of mass violence - the meaning given to them by perpetrators, accomplices, and/or their descendants - may be perceived as mere pretexts for material or strategic interests, they nevertheless determine the terminology, narratives, and heuristics in which these acts are subsequently discussed by inscribing them into the cultural canon. However, through the transmission of justifications, acts of mass violence do not remain one-off, exorbitant events, but have a lasting historical impact, cementing societal fault lines and setting the framework for further conflict. Understanding this dynamic is a basic prerequisite for breaking vicious circles.

Currently we have a research network "The Persistence of Evil" (funded by the German Foundation for Peace Research).

 

Research project: DiREKt-Roma 

In DiREKt-Roma, our team at the University of the Bundeswehr in Munich is conducting life history interviews with members of the Roma community and subsequent thematic in-depth interviews on Roma's experiences of discrimination and violence as well as their strategies of resilience and resistance. Various groups of Roma with and without migration experience are examined in order to reveal complex interdependencies of discrimination and to trace continuities over time (also along migration histories). This detailed examination of the interdependencies and continuities of discrimination and resilience allows nuanced statements to be made with a view to strengthening resilience within the community and for prevention efforts. In order to root the project and its results in the community, it was conceived with the State Council of Roma NRW (and some of its member organizations) and chooses a participatory approach in which interviewers from the Rom*nja community are trained for data collection and evaluation.

 

Research project: SPARTA

The dtec.bw project “SPARTA” - Society, Politics and Risk with Twitter Analysis - is dedicated to analyzing Twitter data in order to produce data-driven insights into political contexts in social media. The interdisciplinary project is building an infrastructure based on state-of-the-art hardware and the latest natural language processing (NLP) approaches to perform these big data analyses. Timothy Williams is responsible for the team dealing with riots.

 

Research project: The Cultural Heritage of Conflict and Politics of Memory
In an international collaborative project together with colleagues in Germany, Sweden and the UK, this project (funded by the Swedish Research Council) studies post-conflict cultural heritage in Rwanda, Cambodia, Bosnia, South Africa and Cyprus. I am focussing on the cases of Cambodia and Rwanda and will be investigating how post-conflict cultural heritage sites and events are used by various actors in the politics of memory.

 

Victimhood, Transitional Justice and Perceptions of Justice and Reconciliation
In this project “Victimhood after mass violence. How victim participation at the ECCC and other dealing with the past projects effect justice” (funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development), I was the principal investigator and am leading a team of researchers and assistants for one year to study how various transitional justice interventions (particularly the hybrid tribunal ECCC) and victim participation in them have influenced civil parties’ and other victims’ perceptions of justice and reconciliation.

 

 

Fieldwork Experience

Namibia: Participant observation in memorials and museums (10-11/2023)

Indonesia: Participant observation at memorial sites and interviews with actors in the politics of remembrance (07-08/2022 )

Myanmar: Scoping visit to ascertain possibilities for future field research (08/2019)

Rwanda: Participant observation of commemoration events and interviews with perpetrators (04/2019)

Rwanda: Visits of memorials and Interviews with actors in memory politics (07-08/2018)

Cambodia: Interviews with civil parties and other victims of the Khmer Rouge regime (05-06/2018)

Cambodia: Interviews with ICJ and memory experts in Phnom Penh and management of a nation-wide survey of civil parties and other victims (01-03/2018)

Cambodia: Interviews with ICJ and memory experts in Phnom Penh (01/2017)

Armenia: Archive research looking for Turkish soldiers’ diaries (07/2015)

Cambodia: Interviews with 59 former cadres of the Khmer Rouge in 10 provinces (07/2014-01/2015)

Cambodia: Preparatory visit with expert interviews and networking for later field visit (03/2014)

Thailand: Expert interviews on the government policies regarding the Malay insurgency in the South  (09/2011-10/2011)