Kai Koddenbrock

Kai Koddenbrock is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Global Cooperation Research at the University of Duisburg-Essen. His research and teaching focus on the pathologization of African politics, specifically with regards to intervention and the possibilities for critique within and beyond contemporary social theory. He is a speaker in the working group on ​“orders of violence” within the German Association of Political Science.

Kai was a consultant to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the GTZ and the Harvard University-SIPA Advanced Training Program for Humanitarian Action. He was also a lead seminar facilitator and tutor for GLEN, Inwent and the Studienwerk Villigst. He interned at the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and at Gardegi, a development NGO in Togo, and has worked at a Camphill School for disabled youngsters in South Africa. His commentary has been featured on the BBC, Deutsche Welle World and various blogs. He is currently working on a book called Ambiguous Practice of Intervention: A Critique of the Self-Evidence of Humanitarianism and Peacekeeping.

Kai holds a PhD in international relations from the University of Bremen and a diploma in international cultural and economic studies from the University of Passau. In 2011, he was a visiting scholar at Columbia University, New York. He has received scholarships from the German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes), the Heinrich-Böll Foundation, the Carlo-Schmid Programme and the ASA Programme.