Highly motivated we have embarked on our successfully granted third funding period. Our team has been expanded with more than twenty new colleagues selected from several hundred applications. From 2014 to 2017, we will focus this third funding period on the evaluation of previous research findings and on theory building.

During this period we will investigate the conditions of successful governance in areas of limited statehood. For our first granted transfer project, we have acquired the German Federal Foreign Office as a new and interesting collaboration partner and look forward to a continuously fruitful mutual exchange.

At the beginning of this year, Dr. Gregor Walter-Drop handed over the scientific management of the SFB 700 to Eric Stollenwerk. We are very excited to welcome Mr. Stollenwerk as our new managing director, especially since he already supported the SFB during its application stage for the third funding period. We wish Dr. Walter-Drop well in his new position as managing director of the Center for Area Studies (CAS) at Freie Universität Berlin.

And as always, we look forward to receiving your thoughts and comments!

Kind regards,

Thomas Risse        

Coordinator SFB 700