Joerg Friedrichs
University of Oxford
Collaborating Network
Affiliations
Associate Professor of Politics, Department of International Development, University of Oxford
Official Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford
Biography
Jörg Friedrichs is Associate Professor at ODID and Official Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. Taking a broad transdisciplinary approach to academic research, his main interests are in the fields of international relations and political sociology. Among other things, he has proposed a new intercultural theory of international relations.
Jörg’s latest book is on Hindu-Muslim Relations: What Europe Might Learn from India (2018). Coming from an increasingly multicultural and multi-religious Europe, he has worked on Muslim minorities and their relations with non-Muslim majorities in India and China.
Building on this, Jörg has now started investigating relations between Muslims and non-Muslims in England. His focus is on community relations in a diverse set of urban neighbourhoods in East London, Birmingham and Halifax (West Yorkshire).
Jörg has studied Classics at the universities of Munich, Tübingen and Rome, finishing with a book on political rhetoric in the work of the ancient Greek historian Thucydides (2000). His doctoral studies in Political Science at Munich led to another book on European Approaches to International Relations Theory (2004). His postdoctoral research led to a third book, Fighting Terrorism and Drugs: Europe and International Police Cooperation (2008).
His fourth book was The Future Is Not What It Used to Be: Climate Change and Energy Scarcity (2013).
Jörg has published on other topics ranging from denial and self-deception to security regionalism in East Asia and from pragmatic research methodology to China’s popularity in the Middle East and Africa. His articles have appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as International Organization, International Theory, Third World Studies, and Philosophical Psychology.
GFI Writings
Joerg Friedrichs
University of Oxford
States and Bureaucracies as Loveless Monsters?
In my field of international relations, Raymond Aron has famously called states “cold monsters” (following Nietzsche; Hobbesian Leviathans and Behemoths are lurking in the background). Monsters are proverbially loveless creatures, and I personally find the idea rather unappealing. Yet, my observatio…
Joerg Friedrichs
University of Oxford
Not the World We Ordered: International Relations and the Ukraine War
In his theology brief on Order Nigel Biggar shows that, while positive law is man-made or posited, there is no human order without law; that, as Christians, we see the law in the light of revelation, sometimes but not always placing us at odds with those who do not contemplate the law in a similar p…
Joerg Friedrichs
University of Oxford
How to Balance Cultivating Virtues with Grace?
The humanist in me cannot but welcome a focus on virtue, although the word “virtue” occurs only four times in the New Testament (Moulton and Milligan, The Vocabulary of the Greek New Testament , London 1929). The most likely reason is that the NT de-emphasizes human merit and emphasizes divine grace…
Joerg Friedrichs
University of Oxford
A Tragic View on Moral Law and International Relations
This is excellent, and highly readable. My only comment is that, in the section on moral law and international relations, a recognition might be in order that some respected and respectable thinkers in the tradition of political realism (including Reinhold Niebuhr, a protestant theologian) have a tr…
Joerg Friedrichs
University of Oxford
Flourishing and Bearing Fruit Are Not the Same Thing
Many people, like myself, “get” things from metaphors and images. Flourishing bears the image of flower. The Bible sometimes talks of ripe corn and bearing fruit, but it oftentimes also talks about flourishing, regardless of fruit, from the flowers on the field that bloom today and tomorrow are gone…