Felix Anderl

About

Felix was a research associate on the ERC-funded project ARTEFACT and is a current member of the Centre for Global Knowledge Studies (gloknos), since January 2019.

He investigates the historical sociology of international politics, with a focus on protest, resistance and critique. He particularly analyses social movements and other critics and their relations to international organisations in the fields of economic policy, development, food and agriculture. In his current project at CRASSH, he investigates possibilities for solidarity across difference and how imaginaries of “the global” constitute, inform or undermine such solidarity. He utilises a mix of methods such as discourse analysis and ethnographic approaches and has gained much of his experience during fieldwork in South-East Asia, especially Indonesia.

Prior to joining CRASSH, Felix worked as a research associate at the Cluster of Excellence: The Formation of Normative Orders at the University of Frankfurt. In his PhD project, he analysed mechanisms of rule in ‘global governance’ with the example of the World Bank Group’s interaction with transnational protest movements. In 2016, he spent three months as a visiting scholar at the Elliott School of International Affairs (Washington DC). He obtained degrees in Political Science and History (BA) from Freiburg University and ‘International Relations: Global Governance and Social Theory’ (MA) from Jacobs University and the University of Bremen.

ARTEFACT-Solidarity

The Epistemics of Solidarity: ARTEFACT-SOLIDARITY investigates Imaginaries of the Global in Solidarity across Difference

Global solidarity is in crisis. Not only have the ‘globalists’ been viciously attacked by right-wing politicians in the OECD-world, the traditional ‘receivers’ of solidarity in the Global South have increasingly highlighted the dependencies created in the project of global solidarity. In the aftermath of the postcolonial critique of development, progress and paternalism, one could get the impression that the ‘claim to the global’ is itself problematic. Solidarity movements have therefore tended to localise, both geographically and in substance. ‘Another world is possible’ simply sounds too abstract and too detached from the lives of many.

How, then, is solidarity across difference possible? ARTEFACT-Solidarity investigates the ways in which solidarity politics across difference depend on and often fail due to their specific conceptions of ‘the global’: many attempts at solidarity have been delegitimised because of their expansionist and prescriptive impulses. Yet, the making-global of particular epistemic norms appears logically prior to render solidarity across difference meaningful – and to practice it accordingly. Hence, there is a strong connection between solidarity with ‘others’ on the one hand, and the concept of the global and its generalising, universalist attire on the other.

Building on these tensions, this project theorises how practices of solidarity across difference are constituted by a specific imaginary of ‘the global’, and how new forms of world-making with their encompassing global imaginaries are constructed by these very practices. The four attempts of world-making that will be examined are:

1. Liberal Post-War Internationalism in the Green Agricultural Revolution
2. Third Way Globalism: ‘Solidarist Internationalism’ at the Bandung Conference
3. Distancing the Self from the Global: Praising the Particular in Third Wave Feminism
4. Appropriating the Global from Below: La Via Campesina’s Fight for Group Rights

The project traces the ways in which solidarity across difference is practiced and the imaginaries of the global that are mobilised in these diverse movements. The results shall illuminate how specific imaginaries of the global can underlie, fuel and destroy solidarity across difference.

ARTEFACT-Solidarity is part of the CRASSH project ARTEFACT, which is funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for Research and Innovation (ERC grant agreement no. 724451). 

Selected Publications

Monographs and Edited Volumes:

• Rule and Resistance Beyond the Nation State: Contestation, Escalation, Exit, ed. by Felix Anderl, Christopher Daase, Nicole Deitelhoff, Victor Kempf, Jannik Pfister and Philip Wallmeier (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2019).

Peer-Reviewed Articles and Chapters in Edited Volumes:

• Priska Daphi, Felix Anderl and Nicole Deitelhoff, ‘Bridges or Divides? Conflicts and Synergies of Coalition Building across Countries and Sectors in the Global Justice Movement,’ Social Movement Studies (published online October 2019).
• Felix Anderl and Philip Wallmeier, ‘”Institution” als Scharnierkonzept zwischen Herrschaft und Widerstand. Ein Vorschlag zur empirischen Analyse transnationaler neoliberaler Herrschaft’, Forschungsjournal Soziale Bewegungen 32, 2 (2019): pp. 192-206.
• Felix Anderl, ‘Soziale Bewegungen [Social Movements]’ in ABC der globalen (Un)Ordnung [The ABC of global (dis)order], ed. Claudia von Braunmühl, Heide Gerstenberger, Ralf Ptak and Christa Wichterich, (VSA: Verlag Hamburg, 2019).
• Felix Anderl, ‘Coherence’, in The Language of World Trade Politics: Unpacking the Terms of Trade, ed. Klaus Dingwerth and Clara Weinhardt (London: Routledge, 2018).
• Felix Anderl and Philip Wallmeier, ‘Modi der Kritik des Internationalen Regierens. Ein Plädoyer für immanente Kritik’ [Modes of Critique in International Relations – the Case for Immanent Critique], Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen, 25 (2018): pp. 65-89.
• Felix Anderl and Elias Steinhilper, ‘Globale soziale Bewegungen? Einführung in die Transnationalisierung und Lokalisierung von Protest’ [Global Social Movements? Introduction to the Transnationalisation and Localisation of Protest], in Politik und Peripherie. Eine politikwissenschaftliche Einführung [Politics and Periphery. A Political Science Introduction] (Second Edition), ed. Ilker Ataç, Albert Kraler, Wolfram Schaffar and Aram Ziai (Vienna: Mandelbaum, 2018).
• Felix Anderl, ‘Protest – Öffnung – Wandel? Transnationale Advocacy-Netzwerke in der ‚geöffneten‘ Gelegenheitsstruktur’ [Protest – Opening-up – Change? Transnational Advocacy Networks in the “Open” Opportunity Structure], “Leviathan 33 (2017): pp. 93-116.
• Felix Anderl, ‘The Myth of the Local: How International Organizations Localize Norms Rhetorically’, Review of International Organizations, 11, 2 (2016): pp. 197-218.

• Felix Anderl, ‘Strengthening Civil Society Through Development Cooperation? Localizing Participation in Post-Suharto Indonesia’, in Localization in Development Aid: How Global Institutions Enter Local Lifeworlds, ed. Thorsten Bonacker, Judith von Heusinger and Kerstin Zimmer (London: Routledge, 2016).