Magdalena Kirchner is a Transatlantic Postdoctoral Fellow in International Relations and Security (TAPIR) at the International Security and Defense Policy Center of the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit global policy think tank in Washington, DC. Prior to that, she had been a TAPIR fellow at the International Security Division of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) and an Associate Fellow at the German Council of Foreign Relations (DGAP), both in Berlin. She has worked as Senior Project Coordinator at the German Atlantic Association, where she currently serves as associated board member as the chairwoman of the Youth Atlantic Treaty Association (YATA) Germany. Since 2009, Kirchner has served as editor for the Security Policy Reader, published by the Federal Ministry of Defense.

Kirchner studied political science and history at the Universities of Heidelberg and Aarhus and holds a doctoral degree from the University of Heidelberg. Following her recently published dissertation, “Why States Rebel: Understanding State Sponsorship of Terrorism,” her research focuses on conflict research and foreign policy analysis in the context of international crisis management with a special focus on the Levant, Iraq, and Turkey. At the University of Heidelberg, she was lecturer at the Institute for Political Science, headed the Working Group "Conflicts in the Middle East and Maghreb" at the Heidelberg Institute for International Conflict Research, and gained international work experience in Turkey, Israel, and Jordan.

Project: “Rising to the Occasion? Turkey and Germany in Transatlantic Crisis Management”

As external security shocks and transnational challenges meet changed intra-alliance expectations of burden-sharing and new opportunities for tailor-made policies, both Germany and Turkey have recently adjusted their policies and positions from bystanders to “leaders from the center.” And yet, to what extent does the observed trend towards more foreign policy activism coincide with enhanced opportunities for “successfully tackling new challenges together?” Three questions will be addressed successively: First, how are different strategies of external crisis management framed in public and elite discourses, especially with regards to the concept of responsibility? Debates on foreign policy activism and even assertiveness have been closely linked to a perception of Europe’s Southeastern neighborhood shaped by endemic crisis and instability. And yet, a national, or even international, consensus on how to contain crisis or even shape regional developments according to their respective national interests has not been articulated yet. To what extent are these changed foreign policy debates accompanied by policy adjustments and the development of new instruments in crisis management? Do “no-strings-attached” strategies in interstate security cooperation like the establishment of informal “Coalitions of the Willing” constitute the new normal? With regard to Turkey’s and Germany’s joint yet not formalized capacity building alignment with the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq, the project also addresses the question of how new partnerships in an uncertain security environment can be managed, on the one hand, and negative cooperation effects reduced, on the other.