Tobias Berger is Juniorprofessor for Political Science with reference to the Transnational Politics of the Global South at the Otto-Suhr-Institute of the Freie Universität Berlin. He is also Principal Investigator at the Cluster of Excellence “Constestations of the Liberal Script”. After obtaining his PhD from the Berlin Graduate School for Transnational Studies,, he was a visiting fellow at the Department of Law and Anthropology at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale, Germany) as well as a junior research fellow at the Institute for the Human Sciences in Vienna. His book on “Global Norms and Local Courts: Translating the Rule of Law in Bangladesh” was published with Oxford University Press in 2017. His broader research interests encompass international political sociology, law, state and society in the Global South, ethnographic methods, and the transnational politics of Southern Asia.

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 worked for several years with indigenous communities in Ecuador and in the field of humanitarian emergency relief in Cambodia.

Tobias Berger‘s research interests include:

• International Political Sociology
• International Politics of Human Rights
• Legal Pluralism, normative diversity, and non-state institutions
• Ethnography and interpretative methods
• Transnational Politics of South Asia

Current research projects:

• De-Centering Human Rights: Liberalism, Human Rights, and the Global South in the research framework of the Cluster of Excellence „Contestations of the Liberal Script“
• Negotiating the Future of Education: The UNESCO’s Futures of Education-initiative and the OECD’s Future of Education and Skills 2030-initiative in the research framework of the Cluster of Excellence „Contestations of the Liberal Script“
• Transformative Constitutionalism and the Borderlines of Liberalism with Prof. Philipp Dann in the research framework of the Cluster of Excellence „Contestations of the Liberal Script“
• Security Doctrines in a Changing World: Exploring Asian and European Policy Strategies towards Africa

Monographs

• *2017: Global Norms and Local Courts: Translating the Rule of Law in Bangladesh. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Special Issues and Edited Volumes

• *2022: Forum: New Perspectives on Transnational Non-State Actors—A Forum Honoring the Work of Thomas Risse
  International Studies Review, Volume 24, Issue 3. Ed. with Anna Holzscheiter, Anja Jetschke, Hans Peter Schmitz and Alejandro Esguerra. Published online 27 July 2022.

• *2018: World Politics in Translation: Power, Relationality, and Difference in Global Cooperation. Abingdon: Routledge (Global Cooperation Series; ed. with Alejandro Esguerra).

Articles

• *2024: Entangled contestations: transnational dynamics of contesting liberal citizenship in South Asia (with Uday Vir Garg). Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Volume 50, Issue 19, pp. 4809-4827.

• *2023: Transnationally entangled (in)securities: The UAE, Turkey, and the Saharan political economy of danger. 
  Security Dialogue, Volume 54, Issue 5 (with Eva Magdalena Stambøl).

• *2023: Human Rights beyond the Liberal Script: A Morphological Approach.
  International Studies Quarterly, Volume 67, Issue 3.

• *2022: Constructivism, Human Rights, and the Sociology of Ignorance
  (with Anja Jetschke). In Berger, Tobias et al. (eds.). Forum: New Perspectives on Transnational Non-State Actors—A Forum Honoring the Work of Thomas Risse. International Studies Review, Volume 24, Issue 3.

• *2022: Worldmaking from the margins: interactions between domestic and international ordering in mid-20th-century India. European Journal of International Relations, Volume 28, Issue 4.

• *2022: Power, status and memory in Indo-East African relations
  (with Karoline Eickhoff), South African Journal of International Affairs, published online 18. February 2022.

• *2021: The ‘Global South’ as a relational category – global hierarchies in the production of law and legal pluralism
  Third World Quarterly, Volume 42, Issue 9, pp. 2001–2017.

• *2020: The logic of non-enforcement: Entanglements between state and non-state law in Bangladesh
  Contributions to Indian Sociology, Volume 54, Issue 2, pp. 152–172.

• *2018: Nichtstaatliches Recht in der Entwicklungszusammenarbeit – Internationale Organisationen, Informelle Gerichte und das Symbolische Kapital von Dokumenten
  Kritische Justiz. Jahrgang 51, Heft 2, pp. 193–204.

• *2017: Linked in translation: international donors and local fieldworkers as translators of global norms
  Third World Thematics – A Third World Quarterly Journal, Volume 2, Issue 5, pp. 606–620.

• 2016: Säkularismus, Islam und die Grenzen der Toleranz in Bangladesch
  Transit. Jahrgang 49, pp. 72–89.

Chapters

• 2021: Denial, Deferral, Translation: Dynamics of entangling and disentangling state and non-state law in postcolonial spaces 

  in Krisch, Nico (ed.). Entangled Legalities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 35–58.

• *2018: Democracy, Human Rights, and the Rule of Law
  (with Milli Lake). In Risse, Thomas, Börzel, Tanja, and Anke Draude (eds.). Oxford Handbook of Governance and Limited Statehood. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• *2018: Introduction: the Objects of Translation
  in Berger, Tobias and Esguerra, Alejandro (eds.). World Politics in Translation (Routledge Global Cooperation Series).

• *2018: Conclusion: Power, Relationality, and Difference in Global Cooperation
  In Berger, Tobias and Alejandro Esguerra (eds.). World Politics in Translation (Routledge Global Cooperation Series).

• *2016: Global Village Courts – International Organizations and the Bureaucratization of Rural Justice in the Global South
  in Niezen, Ronald and Maria Sapignoli (eds.). Palaces of Hope: The Anthropology of Global Organizations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Law and Society Series).

• 2012: Mind the Gap! Political Ethnography & the Translation of Western Concepts in non-Western Contexts
  In Zapf, Holger (ed.). Nichtwestliches Politisches Denken. Zwischen kultureller Differenz und Hybridisierung. Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien.

*Peer Reviewed