Knowledge Transfer and Dialogue Formats
Photo: RADIS
Since 2017, PRIF has been present in Berlin with an office in the building of the Leibniz Association. While it was initially a temporary pilot project, an attempt to shorten distances and improve communication with political actors and organizations in Berlin, the branch has now proved its worth and is firmly established. Sarah Brockmeier-Lange took over in 2024 and has been the competent and energetic representative of PRIF in Berlin ever since.
Sarah Brockmeier-Large has headed PRIF‘s Berlin office since 2024. She is also a Doctoral Researcher as part of the research initiative ConTrust – Trust in Conflict at PRIF and Goethe University Frankfurt and a non-resident fellow at the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi) in Berlin. In her dissertation, she deals with the question of whether and under what circumstances citizen dialogs on foreign policy influence the political trust of citizens.
Why do you think the Berlin office is important? What is its role?
An important function of the Berlin office is to support PRIF’s science communication and to strengthen the exchange between science and politics. The office helps to make PRIF's research visible in the capital and to bring it into political debates through dialogical formats. In addition, the Berlin office serves as a contact point for staff members from Frankfurt for short or long stays in Berlin or for visiting fellows. And we organize, accompany or support annual formats in Berlin for the exchange between PRIF researchers and the political establishment in Berlin.
What are these formats?
A highlight every year is the annual presentation of the Peace Report in Berlin, where the editors and authors present the report at the Federal Press Conference and then in the parliamentary groups of various parties and in the ministries. We also support the exchange between the researchers of the CNTR project (Cluster for Natural and Technical Science Arms Control Research) and the political establishment in Berlin. In 2024, the first CNTR Monitor was launched at the Federal Foreign Office with a focus on “dual use” in research and development. The monitor was discussed in the Federal Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defense, and the Ministry of Education and Research.
Since 2022, each year we have also organized one or more PRIF contributions to the German Forum on Security Policy by the Federal Academy for Security Policy (BAKS). Last year, for example, Pascal Abb and Irene Weipert-Fenner chaired an expert discussion on “The New Regime Competition and its Security Policy Consequences.” Thomas Reinhold, Frank Kuhn and Liska Suckau from the CNTR research alliance spoke on the panel “Arms Control and New Technologies – Recognizing and Seizing Opportunities.”
You’re a political scientist, you’re doing a PhD, and you also have the matching research focus: German foreign policy, crisis prevention, stabilization and peacebuilding as well as public opinion and citizen dialogues on foreign and security policy. How do your research and transfer activities interact? For example, to what extent do your experiences in the dialog formats influence your research work – does “dialogic knowledge transfer” work?
Before joining PRIF, I worked at the United Nations for two years and at the Global Public Policy Institute think tank for ten years, where I also worked on practice-oriented research projects. I find the interface between academia and policy extremely exciting, and I find that having worked on German foreign policy in Berlin for a longer period of time is very helpful in supporting PRIF’s knowledge transfer. For example, when I am invited to events or background discussions because of my background or current research, it is very helpful to follow the nuances of policy debates in Berlin. It also provides an opportunity to feed PRIF’s research findings and expand networks.
You have commented on the reform of the Federal Foreign Office, the further development of development policy, the future of German security policy, and Germany’s first national security strategy. Exciting times. You also design PRIF’s blog series. What topics are particularly important to you?
Like many people, I find the current news situation in the world very depressing. It always helps me a little to think that I can deal professionally with the questions that are really on the minds of many people right now. How can Europe deal with security challenges? How can we preserve our democracy? How can we work for peace? One of the topics I am interested in – one that I am working in my dissertation– is the public debate on foreign and security policy: How do we actually measure public opinion on foreign and security policy? Who talks to citizens about foreign and security policy, and how? How does the interaction between politics, media and citizens work in the public debate? In between, however, I am always concerned with the question of how we need to tackle very practical reforms to make the foreign and security policy bureaucracy more efficient.
You are also an important link to the Leibniz Association. Since 2024, for example, the Leibniz Labs have been established, in which Leibniz Institutes work together on an interdisciplinary basis and with stakeholders from society, politics and business. PRIF participates in three Leibniz Labs: “Pandemic Preparedness,” “Systemic Sustainability” and “Disruptions and Transformations”. You yourself are involved in the latter. What is this project about?
As part of the Leibniz Lab “Disruptions and Transformations”, we organized, together with the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences (GESIS), a workshop on public opinion in foreign and security policy. We brought together researchers who conduct research on public opinion in foreign and security policy or public opinion research in general, researchers and think tank experts who regularly collect and publish survey data, and decision-makers who use surveys in policy making. Our aim was for the different groups to better understand each other’s work, identify challenges and solutions, and foster personal networks to facilitate potential future collaboration and informal problem-solving. The workshop was extremely exciting and revealed very specific gaps in knowledge transfer on these issues. There is already a lot of research going on that is hardly recognized in policy or administration. On the other hand, it is very useful for scientists to hear what questions decision-makers are asking themselves and what formats they know and do not know. For me, this was an excellent example of how dialogue formats and knowledge transfer can be mutually enriching. (kha)