… who is an International Relations researcher at the School of Global Studies at the University of Gothenburg and the first guest of our ‘Five Questions With’–interview series with CISS alumni.

Please describe your activities at CISS:

I first got involved in CISS as an occasional contributor for the Think Tank blog shortly after it came into being. I was friends with two CISS members back then, so I learned quite a lot about the initiative and thought it was a great idea. In 2013, I co-founded the Impact Group EU-ASEAN Perspectives, which brought together students and young professionals from Europe and Southeast Asia to discuss current interregional affairs. Around that time, I also started managing CISS’s regional section for South and East Asia. From 2016 to 2019, I was part of the Executive Board, which is in charge of general strategic decisions and important administrative tasks for the organization.

In your opinion, what makes CISS special? Please describe in three words:

Youth – Drive – Creativity

What have you taken along from your time with CISS?

First, it is amazing what young people can achieve if they put their minds to it. Second, ‘doing’ is sometimes a better way of learning than reading and listening. And finally, running an organization like CISS is hard but also extremely exciting and fun.

What was your most rewarding experience with CISS?

The delegation visits we organized between 2013 and 2016 for the EU-ASEAN Perspectives program were amazing. Having young people from around a dozen European and Southeast Asian countries come to Brussels to discuss issues they were passionate about with experts, policy-makers and civil society organizations was a unique experience. I am still in touch with many of the people I got to know back then, and I know that many friendships have developed thanks to our project.

What do you wish for CISS‘s next 10 years?

It is great to see that CISS continues to inspire people. I wish for the new generation to make CISS their own so the organization can continue to evolve. The most important thing is to keep it fun. Oh, and may all your funding applications be successful!

The three Impact Groups EU-ASEAN Perspectives, Trilateral Peace Talks – Germany, Russia, Ukraine, and Arms Trade were the key projects of 2015. In addition to that, 15 members of CISS held a so-called fire-side-talk with Undersecretary of State Dr. Born to discuss career possibilities in foreign affairs.

The Impact Group EU-ASEAN Perspectives – Part 2 took place in March 2015 in cooperation with the European Institute for Asian Studies and the EU Centre in Singapore.
Pioneering the online-meetings that become normal in today’s world, we at CISS already made use of such tools back in 2015. As part of the Impact Group, 20 students and young professionals from South & East Asia and Europe met online for a workshop to discuss current issues of EU-ASEAN relations. The policy paper which they developed in the course of the virtual meeting was later presented to representatives from politics, diplomacy, Academia, and civil society during a delegation trip to Brussels. The paper was also taken up and discussed by several public institutions and governments within the EU and ASEAN.

Together with the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, the Hertie Foundation, and the Foundation West-Eastern Encounters, the Trilateral Peace Talks brought together 30 young academics and civil society representatives from Russia, Ukraine, and Germany in Berlin for open exchange about the crisis in Ukraine. The four-day event aimed to work on common grounds regarding origins, media coverage, and possible solutions for the armed conflict between Ukraine and Russia. The results of the project were presented to the public in an innovative format at BMW-Stiftung Herbert Quandt in Berlin.

In the light of the controversies about German arms support for the Kurdish Peshmerga, the Impact Groups Arms Trade and the Chair for Empirical Political Research and Policy Analysis of the University of Munich put together an expert panel to discuss decision-making and ethical dimensions of weapon trade.

Siemon Wezeman, a senior researcher with the Arms and Military Expenditure Programme of Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), and Jan Grebe, a researcher on arms exports controls at Bonn International Center for Conversion (BICC) were the keynote speakers of the debate. Together with Prof. Dr. Paul W. Thurner, professor for Empirical Political Research and Policy Analysis at the University of Munich, and Lukas Hafner, student and author of the winning contribution to CISS’s essay competition, they held an insightful debate in front of 95 people.

With so many projects, CISS broadened its network in 2015 and therewith set the foundation for further projects in the years after.

More information can be found here.

Please apply until 23^rd December, 2020 by sending your application to Anne Laible (anne.laible@ciss.eu).

In cooperation with the German Federal Foreign Office, the European Institute for Asian Studies, and the KANITA Center for Research on Women and Gender, the Impact Group EU-ASEAN perspectives brought together a delegation of 13 participants to discuss gender equality with civil-society and political actors in Brussels, Belgium. The developed policy paper included recommendations for politicians of both the European Union and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

With the European University Viadrina, the memorial Deutscher Widerstand, the memorial Sachsenhausen, the Yugra State University, and the memorial Topographie des Terrors as project partners, the Impact Group Memory as a Tool of Change brought together 13 Russian and 13 German students. During the eleven-day exchange program in Berlin, the students developed strategies to deal with the memory culture of the Holocaust in Germany, finding also transfer points to the history of violence in totalitarian Russia. In the course of the program, the students visited the European University Viadriana,
performed a research trip to the memorial place Sachsenhausen and held a panel discussion at the memorial Deutscher Widerstand.

In the course of the Impact Group United Nations Parliament, a discussion of the practical implementation of a parliamentary assembly at the United Nations, as well as a theoretically driven debate on the pros and cons of a world parliament, took place. During the simulation “Model United Nations Parliament”, 50 international participants slipped into the role of a national ambassador and negotiated possible terms and statutes of a parliamentary assembly at the United Nations. Under the general topic of democratization of international politics, lecturers, students, and representatives of civil society and the church discussed the possibilities and the necessity of a world parliament for the global order. Partners of the Impact Group included UNPA-Campaign, the United Nations‘ student group of the Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU), Evangelical Academy Berlin, Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes, Deutsche Gesellschaft für die Vereinten Nationen e.V, Vereinigung der Freunde und Förderer der MLU, and Studierendenrat MLU.

The Impact Group LACalytics brought together 46 students and young professionals from 23 European,
Latin-American, and Caribbean countries. As bi-regional teams, they developed and published interdisciplinary policy papers about regional challenges and developments. In October 2016, CISS invited the best authors to a final conference in Hamburg, Germany, organized in cooperation with the EU-LAC Foundation and the Senate Office of Hamburg. During the four-day conference, the participants presented the findings of their articles and had the opportunity to discuss these with actors working in the field of EU-Latin America relations. The twelve best articles were published in the trilingual report “EU-LAC Cooperation in the 21st Century: Combining Efforts in a Globalized World”. Due to its success, LACalytics was repeated twice and a selected number of articles were republished in the course of CISS’s Latin American and Caribbean Weeks in September 2020.

Impact Group members during an excursion in Armenia

The burden of the past and blind spots in the construction of national historical truths often manifest in obstacles to intergovernmental cooperation. However, the mutual exchange of societies’ experiences and their understanding of past events can facilitate processes of remembrance, reappraisal, and reconciliation. The Impact Group “Common Remembrance, Future Relations” aimed to reduce images of the other to initiate reciprocal learning processes in remembrance, commemoration, and reconciliation work, fostering intercultural cooperation through collaborative projects and exchange. In cooperation with the Nongovernmental Organization (NGO) Armenia Progressive Youth (APY) and
under the patronage of Michael Roth, Minister of State for Europe
at the German Federal Foreign Office,

Participants during the introductory workshop in Yerevan, Armenia in May 2017

CISS brought together twenty NGOs from Armenia, France, Germany, Israel, and Turkey in Yerevan, Armenia. The participants developed their own projects,  exploring various forms of remembrance, and fostering the dialogue between the different cultures. In the course of the project, eight teams were formed, planning their joint projects.
The three-part Impact Group started with an introductory workshop in Yerevan in May 2017, followed by work meetings of the group partners over the summer. In September 2017, the final meeting of the entire Impact Group took place in Berlin. This event provided a forum to exchange ideas about the work shadowing, to discuss challenges of the work of NGOs regarding remembrance, reappraisal, and reconciliation as well as future perspectives.

Participants speaking to contemporary witnesses in Siberia

The second series of CISS’s Impact Group “Memory as a Tool for Change”, supported by the German Federal Foreign Office, brought 14 students from Austria and Germany to Western Siberia. Together with participants from the region, they spent two weeks discussing Russian commemorative culture and today’s reappraisal of Stalinist terror. Visiting different places of remembrance and talking to historians and experts, participants discussed how contemporary Russian society and politics commemorate the terrors of the last century, including forced displacement and the system of prison and labor camps.
The group was particularly interested in learning more about the phenomenon of increasing Stalin nostalgia, and why certain events become part of cultural memory while others are dismissed, often by communities of shared memory themselves. Notable highlights were meetings with contemporary witnesses, an excursion to two labor camps along the Transpolar Railway, and the collection of essays in which participants processed their impressions.