Dr. Jannis Julien Grimm heads the junior research group "Radical Spaces" at the Center for Interdisciplinary Peace and Conflict Research since October 2021. He holds a PhD in political science on the relationship between political violence and state repression in Egypt from the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures, Freie Universität Berlin. After his doctoral studies at the BGSMCS and until April 2021, Jannis coordinated the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung's regional trade union support program in the MENA region, its regional project on the development of socially just economic policies, as well as the FES country project on Libya. Between 2016 and 2020, Jannis furthermore served as a co-director of the "SAFEResearch" project, based at the University of Gothenburg's GLD Center. In the project, he mainly coordinated the working group on data security and digital safety. Jannis has been a visiting fellow at the COSMOS Center on Social Movement Studies at Scuola Normale Superiore Florence and the Orient Institute Istanbul, amongst others, and has conducted extensive research on processes of mass mobilisation and regime change in the Arab world at the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik/SWP Berlin and the Mittelmeerinstitut of the Humboldt University Berlin.

Jannis Grimm is a board member and associate researcher at the Institute for Protest and Social Movement Research (ipb) in Berlin, where he co-edits of the ipb working paper series. He is also a member of the editorial board of FJSB - the German journal of social movement studies. His handbook for safe and ethical field research in hostile environments "Safer Field Research in the Social Sciences" was published by SAGE in 2020. His monograph "Contested Legitimacies: Repression and Revolt in Post-Revolutionary Egypt," which won the German Middle East Studies Association's dissertation award in 2020 and the German Political Science Association's research award in 2021, is forthcoming in the "Protest and Social Movements" series by Amsterdam University Press.

Jannis Grimm's work centres on the dynamics of social mobilization and state repression, the interpretive struggles over the legitimacy of political violence as a repertoire of action, and the social and cultural consequences of mass protest and violent events. Empirically, the regional focus of this research is primarily on the Middle East and North Africa. Conceptually, his work aims to further the development of integrated and dynamic methods to analye contentious politics and violence. An additional focus of Jannis' work consists in the development of comprehensive guidance for social scientists on the topic of research ethics as well as the physical and digital risks of field research in conflict areas and authoritarian contexts.

Research interests:

• Social movements and protest
• Political violence and repression
• Middle East and North Africa
• Political Islam
• Protest Event Analysis
• Discourse Analysis
• Mixed Methods
• Research Security / Research Ethics
• Digital Security and Surveillance

Working papers:

• Grimm, Jannis. 2022 (forthc.). Mobilisierungsdynamiken, Hegemoniekrisen und neue Protestakteure: Eine Dekade Protestforschung zu den Umbrüchen im Nahen Osten und Nordafrika, Forschungsjournal Soziale Bewegungen, 35(2).
• Grimm, Jannis. 2022 (forthc.). The Mixed Blessing of Digital Fieldwork: Digital Security and Ethical Dilemmas of Remote Research during and after the Pandemic, QMMR.
• Grimm, Jannis. The structured contingency of revolutionary episodes: A nested approach to studying radical uncertainty during ransformative events.

• Grimm, Jannis. Revolutionary burnout: Failure, maturation, and the deradicalization of activism in post-revolutionary Lebanon.

• Grimm, Jannis. Dying for a Cause: Mobilizing martyrdom in Egypt, Lebanon and Sudan.

• Grimm, Jannis. The protest-repression-legitimisation-nexus: Event catalogues as a backbone for longitudinal discourse analysis.

Selected publications:

• Grimm, Jannis. 2022. Contested Legitimacies: Repression and Revolt in Post-Revolutionary Egypt. Amsterda: Amsterdam University Press.

• Grimm, Jannis and Amirah El-Haddad. 2022. The costs of making Egypt an intimate partner on security affairs. In: The Current Column. Bonn: GDI/DIE.

• Grimm, Jannis; Koehler, Kevin; Lust, Ellen; Saliba, Ilyas; Schierenbeck, Isabell. 2020. Safer Field Research in the Social Sciences: A Guide to Human and Digital Security in Hostile Environments. London: SAGE.

• Grimm, Jannis and Teresa Fehrenbach. 2020. “The Revolution will not be canceled.” In: IPS Journal. Berlin: FES.

• Grimm, Jannis and Nina Wienkoop (Eds). 2019. "Konflikt, Kompromiss, Konsensus. Das ambivalente Verhältnis von Bewegungen und Institutionen", Forschungsjournal Soziale Bewegungen, 32(2).
• Grimm, Jannis and Merin Abbass. 2019. Wenn die Waffen sprechen. Ursachen, Auslöser und Folgen des Bürgerkriegs in Libyen. Berlin: FES.
• Grimm, Jannis. 2019. "Egypt is not for Sale! Harnessing Nationalism for Alliance Building in Egypt’s Tiran and Sanafir Island Protests", Mediterranean Politics, 24(4):443-466.
• Grimm, Jannis, Nina Wienkoop and Moritz Sommer. 2019. “Introduction: Konflikt, Kompromiss, Konsensus. Das ambivalente Verhältnis von Bewegungen und Institutionen”, Forschungsjournal Soziale Bewegungen, 32(2): 125–136.
• Grimm, Jannis. 2018. "Das Ende des ‘Arabischen Frühlings’ der Bewegungsforschung", Forschungsjournal Soziale Bewegungen, 31(3): 84–92.
• Grimm, Jannis and Cilja Harders. 2018. "Unpacking the Effects of Repression: the Evolution of Islamist Repertoires of Contention in Egypt after the Fall of President Morsi", Social Movement Studies, 17(1): 1-18.
• Grimm, Jannis and Ilyas Saliba. 2017. "Free Research in Fearful Times: Conceptualizing a Global Index to Monitor Academic Freedom", IdPS-Interdisciplinary Political Studies, 3(1): 41-75.
• Grimm, Jannis. 2016. Deteriorating Conditions for Academic Resesarch in MENA, in: APSA MENA Newsletter, 1, pp. 10-12
• Grimm, Jannis. 2015. Repressing Egypt’s Civil Society. State Violence, Restriction of the Public Sphere, and Extrajudicial Persecution, SWP Comments 2015/C 41, Berlin: Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik

• Grimm, Jannis. 2015. #We Are Not Charlie. Muslims’ Differentiated Reactions to the Paris Attacks, and the Dangers of Indiscriminate Finger-pointing, SWP Comments 2015/C 12, Berlin: Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik.

• Grimm, Jannis. 2015. "Menschenrechte in Nordafrika: Ernüchterung macht sich breit", Politische Ökologie, 2 (141): 58-64.

• Grimm, Jannis. 2015. "Eine Schwalbe macht noch keinen Frühling: Die arabischen Umbrüche in der politikwissenschaftlichen Literatur", Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft, 9 (1-2): 97-118.