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Prof. Dr. Timothy WilliamsJunior Professorship of Insecurity and Social OrderInstitute of Political Science
Tel.: +49 89 6004-2408 www.unibw.de/timothy.williams Twitter: @_tim_williams_ |
Timothy Williams is a political scientist and conflict researcher whose research and teaching focus on international politics of sustainable transitions from violence and discrimination, the politics of memory, digital violence, and genocide and perpetrators. In particular, his research interrogates how social and political actors negotiate memory of mass violence, ongoing discrimination, intersectional differences and diverging notions of justice and peace in creating or undermining sustainability and peace. Furthermore, he is interested in the dynamics of violence in physical and digital spaces, seeking to understand both how people discuss violence and how they come to engage in it. He draws on qualitative methods (interviews, participant observation) in field research in Southeast Asia and East Africa, as well as QCA and, in cooperation with colleagues, NLP and big data methods in the digital space.
His current book Memory Politics after Mass Violence (2025, Bristol UP) deals with memory politics in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Indonesia and shows how, in international politics and sustainable transformations after mass violence, political actors construct the roles of perpetrators, victims, and heroes in their representations of the violent past in order to consolidate power and gain legitimacy. Previously, he collaborated with Johanna Mannergren, Annika Björkdahl, Susanne Buckley-Zistel, and Stefanie Kappler on a book (2024, Manchester UP) entitled Peace and the Politics of Memory, which examines five cases of memory entanglements and how they affect peace. His first book, The Complexity of Evil: Perpetration and Genocide (2021, Rutgers UP), examined the motivations of perpetrators to participate in genocide.
After studying political science in Mannheim and comparative politics at the London School of Economics, Timothy Williams completed his PhD at the Centre for Conflict Studies of Marburg University. His PhD has since been acknowledged with two awards, one by the university of Marburg, the other by the German Peace Psychologist Association. He was also a postdoc and project leader of various projects at the Centre for Conflict Studies in Marburg before he moved to the Bundeswehr University Munich where he is also co-Chairman of the research centre RISK. Timothy Williams is Vice President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars and co-editor-in-chief of the ZeFKo Studies in Peace and Conflict.
For more information on my research please also see my personal website.