The Department of Political Science at FAU is pleased to welcome Prof. Dr. Tobias Berger as the new Chair of International Relations. On 1 September 2026, Tobias Berger was appointed Professor of International Relations by FAU President Prof. Dr.-Ing. Joachim Honegger. Tobias Berger is a political scientist whose research focuses on inter- and transnational politics in the Global South. Before joining FAU, he was a Junior Professor at the Otto Suhr Institute of Political Science at Freie Universität Berlin and Principal Investigator of the Cluster of Excellence “Contestations of the Liberal Script” (SCRIPTS). After completing his doctorate at the Berlin Graduate School for Transnational Studies, he was a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Law and Anthropology at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale), as well as a Junior Research Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna.
He studied Political Theory at the University of Oxford (MPhil) and Politics & Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (BA). He also spent several years working with Indigenous communities in Ecuador and in the field of humanitarian emergency and disaster relief in Cambodia. In 2024/25, he spent a year as a Visiting Scholar at the Robert Schuman Centre of the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence.
In his research and teaching, Tobias Berger focuses in particular on the emergence and transformation of international order(s), with a particular emphasis on the role and agency of actors from the Global South. Further areas of interest include sociological and historical approaches to International Relations, international human rights politics and international security politics, as well as ethnographic and interpretive methods.