Germany’s 2023 Feminist Foreign Policy (FFP) Guidelines commit to a transformative, intersectional agenda across diplomacy, security, and climate policy, but omit migration. This article examines how and why migration was excluded, despite its centrality to foreign policy and the involvement of civil society in the drafting process. Drawing on practice theory, Black feminist and postcolonial scholarship, we analyze state–civil society consultations as a community of practice shaped by epistemic hierarchies based on race and coloniality. We show how the Foreign Office’s reliance on established, Germany-based policy actors with limited expertise in gendered mobility sidelined migration as a feminist concern. The consultation format constrained participation and reinforced boundaries around what counted as legitimate feminist knowledge. Bridging literature on migration and FFP, the article advances understandings of how institutional and epistemic power shape feminist policy-making. It calls for a more inclusive FFP attentive to the gendered and racialized dynamics of mobility.

Two interrelated trends have narrowed the class backgrounds of policymakers over the past decades: a decreasing share of working-class MPs and a parallel rise of highly educated ‘career politicians’ with little occupational experience outside politics. Although these trends risk aggravating representational inequality, we know little about their causes. Focusing on parties as the main gatekeepers to parliament, we analyse how the class background of political candidates influences the chances of being nominated in electorally safer positions. Based on original data on MPs’ backgrounds and the German GLES Candidate Study, we show that candidates with a working-class background have lower chances to be placed in safe positions, especially in center-right parties. Careerists, in contrast, enjoy systematic advantages in the nomination process, at least in left-wing parties. Lacking individual resources is thus not the only obstacle to working-class representation, but political parties are important actors in shaping the class composition of parliaments.

Changing legal environments create new opportunities for legal mobilization by civil society groups. At stake is mobilization in Germany and Europe for the prosecution of agents of the Syrian Assad regime accused of committing core international crimes. Changes in the legal environment include the (a) spread of universal jurisdiction; (b) increasing use of “crimes against humanity”; (c) new prosecutorial and policing units specialized in core international crimes; and (d) new prosecutorial practices, such as structural investigations. Coinciding with an influx of Syrian refugees, these opportunities give rise to a collaborative network of (I)NGOs that feed witnesses and evidence into prosecutorial agencies. Interaction between agencies and (I)NGOs contributes to the transnational ordering of criminal law and constitutes a Prosecutorial-NGO (P-NGO) Complex. (I)NGOs finally diffuse court narratives to a broad audience and shape public knowledge of grave violations of human rights. We focus on the P-NGO Complex for the al-Khatib universal jurisdiction trial before the Higher Regional Court in Koblenz, Germany. Empirical tools include an analysis of (I)NGO network structures and websites, interviews with court observers, activists, and prosecutorial staff, and an analysis of media reporting.

Blue pigments are absent in Palaeolithic art. This has been ascribed to a lack of naturally occurring blue pigments or low visual salience of these hues. Using a suite of archaeometric approaches, the authors identify traces of azurite on a concave stone artefact from the Final Palaeolithic site of Mühlheim-Dietesheim, Germany. This represents the earliest use of blue pigment in Europe. The scarcity of blue in Palaeolithic art, along with later prehistoric uses of azurite, may indicate that azurite was used for archaeologically invisible activities (e.g. body decoration) implying intentional selectivity over the pigments used for different Palaeolithic artistic activities.

This article argues that the image of the ‘bad German’ and the animus that accompanied it was tempered by that of the defeated German and the pity Italians in liberal and Catholic circles expressed for German misery. Such sympathetic expressions were not confined to the ruling elite but circulated broadly in media representations and in accounts given by Italians who travelled north in the early postwar years. To view Germans as objects of pity was an empowering act and a humanising one. As an emotion and a practice, pity provided a blueprint for how to think and feel about the former enemy – and oneself – that, in Italy, reinforced Catholic and liberal frameworks for political and social reconstruction. Important to constructions of East–West difference and to the Christian democratic groundings of Western Europe, pity continues to shape debates on European identity, immigration and humanitarian aid.

How does anti-immigrant rhetoric by mainstream politicians affect norms of tolerance? How does this compare to similar statements made by radical-right politicians? Drawing on experimental evidence, we find that statements by mainstream politicians lead to more norm erosion than similar statements by radical-right politicians. Subsample analyses suggest that this is because statements by mainstream-right politicians erode norm perceptions of right-wing individuals, while those by radical-right politicians induce backlash among left-wing individuals, who hold closer to the norm in place. The latter effect (backlash by the left) disappears when similar statements are made by mainstream right politicians. We argue that this difference occurs because mainstream politicians represent the views of a larger part of the population or have a higher status. Our results highlight the pivotal role of mainstream politicians in enforcing or eroding democratic norms, and that similar political statements can have different effects depending on their sender.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, described by Chancellor Olaf Scholz as a Zeitenwende (turning point) triggered a fundamental rethinking of German foreign, security, and defence policy. This article conceptualises the invasion as a temporal shock to Germany’s ontological security. Building on the ‘temporal turn’ in International Relations, we argue that the war not only violated Ukraine’s national sovereignty and territorial integrity, but it also disrupted a broader sense of chronological continuity in European security, long defined by reduced defence spending and the assumption that interstate war was obsolete. Where previous studies have focused on the interrelationship of ontological security and temporality built around the concepts of biographical continuity, collective memory, and mnemonical security, this paper focuses instead on narrative disruption and the retiming of national security and identity via the perception of external shocks. We contend that the Zeitenwende narrative challenged historical concepts of German ontological security, such as Ostpolitik and Wandel durch Handel, that were deeply embedded in a strategic culture of military reticence by calling for the revitalisation of German military power. Yet this retiming remains constrained by incremental policy implementation and historical associations with Germany’s militaristic past, creating ongoing ontological insecurity about Germany’s role in European security.

Although the social democrats fundamentally opposed the political order of the German Empire, they participated in parliament from the beginning. The party not only sat on the parliamentary benches, but its representatives also proved to be committed parliamentarians. Using a combination of parliamentary, party, and movement sources, this article shows that social democrats’ parliamentary participation followed two lines of reasoning. First, the party admitted that parliamentary participation served publicity purposes. In fact, social democrats took the Reichstag stage to present their political project to the masses. Second, the party was less willing to admit that parliament fitted perfectly into the associational tradition of working-class culture. Orderly and fair debate had been the norm of social democratic activism long before the party was founded. It is precisely this last aspect that provides an important and previously overlooked explanation for the social democrats’ surprising devotion to a political system they so deeply detested.

Recently, former colonial powers in the Global North have begun addressing their colonial pasts through their foreign policies. Some of these states pursue a feminist foreign policy (FFP). However, to date, only one FFP makes explicit mention of colonial legacies: that of Germany, adopted in 2021. How does German FFP discourse address this and what political work does this do? Contributing to critiques of coloniality in FFP, we analyze the discursive representation of Germany’s colonial past in foreign policy texts since 2021. Drawing on the socio-critical concepts theater of reconciliation by Max Czollek and remembrance superiority by Mohamed Amjahid, we find that the discourse powerfully establishes gendered notions of caring, responsible, and reflexive German statehood. This organizes how Germany’s engagement with its colonial past is told and which forms of engagement with former colonies are rendered intelligible. We argue that German FFP erases colonial structures that permeate German foreign policy and reproduces coloniality through discursive representations.

The conventional historiography of eighteenth-century Prussia portrays peasants as completely dominated by their imperious Junker superiors. Since the 1980s, a revisionist tendency has challenged this asymmetrical picture of lord-peasant relations, downplaying the oppressiveness of the manorial system and arguing that peasants were equally capable competitors in the “tug-of-war” with their lords. This article evaluates the revisionists’ claims using the historical findings they, and others, have produced about the relationship of lords and peasants in rural Prussia. The evidence supports the contention that peasants were, to a significant extent, the victims of the Prussian manorial system.

This paper studies public opinion towards the introduction of a universal basic income in the case of Germany. Using novel data from a vignette survey experiment conducted in the summer of 2022, we analyse to what extent variations in the policy design characteristics of a hypothetical basic income scheme affect levels of support. We find that support for basic income strongly depends on these characteristics, with support being highest for schemes that are relatively generous, paid to citizens and long-term residents, paid to individuals rather than households, unconditional and financed with taxing the rich. In a further step, we explore interaction effects between vignette dimensions and respondent characteristics, finding significant heterogenous treatment effects in the cases of income, age and ideology.