Dr. Olaf Kleist
Co-Head Expert Group on Democracy Promotion and Democratic Practice
E-mail: kleist(at)dezim-institut.de fon: 0049 (0) 30-200754-151Dr. Olaf Kleist is a political scientist specializing in research on democracy promotion, evaluation as well as forced migration and refugee politics. He received his PhD in 2012 from Freie Universität Berlin, after research stays in Melbourne and Oxford, with a thesis on the relationship between migration and memory politics using the example of Australia. He worked as a postdoc at IMIS, University of Osnabrück and for two years as a DFG Research Fellow at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford before returning to IMIS, where he coordinated a BMBF-funded collaborative project on the state of refugee studies. He joined DeZIM in 2018 and is co-head of Fachgruppe sinde 2020. He has published in Journal of Refugee Studies, Ethnic&Racial Studies, Peripherie, Zeitschrift für Ausländerrecht und Ausländerpolitik (ZAR), Forschungsjournal Soziale Bewegungen and Journal of Intercultural Studies, among others, and with PalgraveMacmillan, Nomos and transcript.
Research focus
- Democracy promotion und diversity
- Program evaluation
- Refugee research (research field)
- forced migration and refugees in political theory
- migration and social/political memories