Kai Oppermann, DAAD/AGI Research Fellow

Kai Oppermann is Professor of International Politics at the Chemnitz University of Technology. He has previously held positions at the University of Sussex, King’s College London, and the University of Cologne. His research centers on the domestic sources of European integration and foreign policy with a focus on transatlantic relations and British and German foreign policy. Dr. Oppermann won a Marie Curie Fellowship for a research project on EU referendums and worked as a specialist advisor to the House of Lords External Affairs Sub-Committee in the UK. His work has been published in international peer-reviewed journals such as European Journal of International Relations, West European Politics, Foreign Policy Analysis, Journal of European Public Policy, and British Journal of Politics and International Relations. Dr. Oppermann is a co-editor at German Politics and an associate editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Foreign Policy Analysis (2018). He regularly gives media interviews on topics related to German and British foreign policy and transatlantic relations.

At AICGS, Dr. Oppermann will research the Biden administration’s expectations of German foreign and security policy. The project takes a theoretical perspective which emphasizes the importance of such expectations for the trajectory of German foreign and security policy as well as for the future shape of U.S.-German relations. Specifically, the views of the Biden administration will impact ongoing domestic debates in Germany about the changing strategic environment and international responsibilities of German foreign and security policy, and they will delineate the scope for U.S.-German cooperation and conflict in foreign and security policy.

In the empirical analysis, the project zooms in on expectations of the Biden administration in four areas high on the agenda of U.S.-German relations in the coming years: a) Germany’s contributions to NATO, b) Germany’s role in the post-Brexit EU27, c) German support for the United States in multilateral diplomacy, and d) Germany’s relations with Russia and China. For each of these areas, the project pursues three interrelated research questions that explore the direction (what?), salience (how important?), and relationship to Germany’s past and current foreign policy (demand for change?) of the Biden administration’s expectations.

The DAAD/AICGS Research Fellowship is supported by the DAAD with funds from the Federal Foreign Office.