Dr. Jan Busse

The Middle East Conflict: History, Positions, Perspectives The standard work in its 12th revised and updated edition. “Essential for understanding Israel and its situation.” Der Tagesspiegel “An outstandingly successful overview.” Süddeutsche Zeitung

Dr. Jan Busse works as a research associate at the Chair of International Politics and Conflict Research. He holds a master's degree in Global Politics from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and a bachelor's degree in Political Science from Bielefeld University. From 2014 to 2020, he was co-director of the Israeli European Policy Network, and from 2017 to 2022, he was a member of the Arab German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

From 2025 to 2027, Dr. Jan Busse will serve as managing editor of the Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen (Journal of International Relations) together with Prof. Dr. Bernhard Stahl (University of Passau).

Research interests

Jan Busse's research interests include historical and international political sociology in international relations, with a particular focus on Foucauldian poststructuralism and (de)constructivist theories of global order formation.

His regional focus is on political and social dynamics in the Middle East and North Africa, particularly Israel and Palestine. He also studies European and German foreign policy in the Middle East.

His research has been published in leading international academic journals such as International Studies Review, International Political Sociology, and Middle East Critique.

In 2024, he edited the journal forum “Contextualizing the Contextualizers: How the Area Studies Controversy is Different in Different Places”, and in 2022, his book Das rebellische Spiel: Die Macht des Fußballs im Nahen Osten und die Katar WM (The Rebellious Game: The Power of Soccer in the Middle East and the Qatar World Cup) In 2021, he published the edited volume The Globality of Governmentality: Governing an Entangled World, and in 2021 he co-edited the special issue “MENA Political Science research a decade after the Arab uprisings: Facing the facts on tremulous grounds” of the journal Mediterranean Politics. In 2020, his book Deconstructing the Dynamics of World Societal Order: The Power of Governmentality in Palestine was published in paperback by Routledge in the series The New International Relations. The book Der Nahostkonflikt: Geschichte: Positionen, Perspektiven (The Middle East Conflict: History, Positions, Perspectives) has been published in the C.H. Beck Wissen series since 2016 and has since established itself as a standard work (12th edition 2024).

Current research interests

• The historical and social foundations of political order in a global context
• The Israeli-Arab conflict
• The interplay between borders and political order in the Middle East
• Football, power, and politics in the Middle East and North Africa
• European and German policy toward the Middle East conflict
• Conflicts in Europe's neighborhood and the EU as an actor in conflict governance
• The further development of the area studies controversy