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Mathis Lohaus

Postdoctoral researcher

Freie Universität Berlin

Welcome!

I’m a research associate (Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter) at the Otto Suhr Institute of Political Science, Freie Universität Berlin. My focus is on International Relations.

Interests

  • International organizations
  • Norm and policy diffusion
  • Politics of anti-corruption
  • Global IR/sociology of science
  • Learning about R & methods

Education

  • Dr. rer. pol., 2016

    Freie Universität Berlin

  • MA in political science, 2012

    Freie Universität Berlin

  • BA in political science, 2009

    Universität Bremen

Research

Currently, I am working on three broad topics. First, I am interested in international organizations and the diffusion of standards and international law. In my book, Towards a Global Consensus Against Corruption, I compare the contents and legal design of international anti-corruption agreements. I argue that they are shaped by diffusion processes between international organizations. Yet the agreements vary significantly because member states use them as signals of their commitment to different audiences.

Second, I have joined the project “Global Pathways” in 2018. We analyze the field of International Relations with an emphasis on how knowledge spreads across different sub-communities. This interdisciplinary research group draws on ideas from the sociology of science, network analysis, and bibliometrics.

Third, I take part in the new “TRANSNORMS” project (2019-2024) led by Thomas Risse. We investigate how global norms are translated in domestic politics, and what effects these translation processes have on implementation. The project thus aims to combine several approaches on norms, diffusion, and translation. To analyze a large number of cases in parallel, we (will) use text-as-data techniques such as topic modeling.