Prof. Dr. Kai Koddenbrock

-Short Curriculum Vitae-
Kai Koddenbrock (born 1981) is Professor of International Relations and Political Economy at the Faculty of Sociology at Bielefeld University. His work operates at the interface of political economy, international relations and postcolonial theory and examines questions of political and economic sovereignty, financialisation and global power relations, particularly in the Global South. He has recently turned his attention to questions of geoeconomics, rearmament in Germany and the European race for critical raw materials.

After studying linguistics, economics and area studies at the University of Passau (graduated in 2008), he completed his doctorate in political science at the University of Bremen (2013) and received his habilitation at the Goethe University Frankfurt (2020). Further appointments have taken him to the Universities of Aachen, Duisburg-Essen, Bayreuth, Witten/Herdecke and Bard College Berlin, as well as to advisory positions at the United Nations (UNOCHA, WFP) and as a Fellow at the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin.

He has spent research stays at institutions such as Columbia University, Sciences Po Paris and Bordeaux, the EHESS and the Institute for Advanced Studies, Paris, the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies and the University of Sussex. He is associated with the Global South Studies Centre at the University of Cologne and a member of the Africa Multiple Cluster(s) of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth. He has received extensive research funding from the German Research Foundation, the German Foundation for Peace Research and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

His work appears regularly in international journals. As an editor, he was recently responsible for the volumes Capital Claims (2022, with Benjamin Braun), Delinking and Global Reparations (2024, with Ndongo Sylla) and African Economic and Monetary Sovereignty in the 21st Century (2021, with Maha ben Gadha and Ndongo Sylla). His most recent monograph is The practice of humanitarian Intervention (2015). In addition to his research, he regularly publishes in media such as FAZ, Jacobin, Makronom and The Conversation.

Main research areas:

• Political and economic sovereignty and self-determination in the Global South
• International financial and monetary relations and forms of financial dependency
• Geoeconomics, armament and war in the international order
• Political economy of critical raw materials and the green transition
• Postcolonial political economy and global inequality relations