Maria Josepha Debre

Academic Year: 
2017-18
Direction: 
To Yale
Exchange Partners: 
Freie University
Project Title: 
Autocracy from the Outside in? The Role of Regional Organizations in Boosting Authoritarian Regimes

Maria is a third year PhD candidate with the Berlin Graduate School of Transnational Studies at Free University Berlin, where she conducts research on the international dimension of authoritarian resilience within the research college ‘The Transformative Power of Europe’. Her research focuses on the domestic impact of regionalism on non-democratic regimes, particularly if and how regional international organizations can help autocrats to stabilize their rule. Maria will spend the 2017-2018 academic year as a Fox Fellow at Yale where she plans to finalize her dissertation. She has previously studied comparative politics with a focus on Middle Eastern Affairs, International Relations and EU Studies in Germany and Canada, and has worked with the Institute of Middle Eastern Studies at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA), and the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP).

Policy Brief: “How Global Efforts to Promote Regional Organizations Can Strengthen Authoritarian Regimes”