• Vita

    Dieter Gosewinkel, trained as a lawyer and historian, is a senior research fellow and former director of the research center “Global Constitutionalism” at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center and Professor of History at the Freie Universität Berlin. His work focuses on the history of citizenship in Europe, comparative constitutional and legal history, intellectual and political history of Europe, civil society and civility. In recent years, Gosewinkel was a Faculty Fellow of the University of Cologne (Department of History), St Antony’s College at Oxford University, Sciences Po Paris, and the Robert Schuman Center for Advanced Study (EUI), and Visiting Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales Paris, University Paris X, University of Paris II-Assas. He also was a Research Fellow at the Max-Weber-Kolleg in Erfurt, Institut d’Études Avancées Paris, Käte Hamburger Kolleg Recht als Kultur in Bonn. Gosewinkel was Stifterverband Fellow at St Antony’s College Oxford, Jean-Monnet Fellow at the Robert Schuman Center for Advanced Study, EUI (declined), holder of the Alfred-Grosser Guest Chair at Sciences Po Paris, and a recipient of the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Volkswagen Foundation, the Thyssen Foundation, and the German-Israeli Foundation. He is member of the Academia Europaea.

  • Research Project

    "Public Enemies!” - Exclusions from the Legal Community. Germany, France, USA, Israel in the 20th and 21st Century

    Every state marks and fights "public enemies". While state action in liberal democracies is fundamentally based on law, the fight against "public enemies" goes beyond this. In extreme cases, states exclude their "enemies" from the community of law in order to combat them effectively. This project takes us to this borderline. It takes up two extreme forms of exclusion: Firstly, denationalisation, i.e. the forced exclusion from citizenship; secondly, targeted killings, i.e. the targeted use of lethal force by states against people who are marked as "public enemies" and thus as a fundamental danger to the state order.

    The historically conceived project is concerned with the motives, means, justifications and consequences of the radical exclusion of "public enemies", which represents an archetypal structure of action that has pervaded the history of the modern state from the beginning. The project aims to compare four democracies - Germany, France, the USA and Israel - which handle the exclusion of "public enemies" differently. Above all, it explores the question of to what extent and why, in addition to tendencies towards the standardisation of denationalisation regulations, very different legitimation discourses and practices of targeted killings exist in the four countries. Does this point to historically and culturally different influences and ruptures as the cause of diverse and different legal developments.

  • Selected Publications

    Gosewinkel, Dieter, Concept of Citizenship, in: Figueiredo, João/ Lieb, Claudia/ Ludwig, Ulrike/ Mösch, Sophia/ Oestmann, Peter/ Seebröker, Benjamin (Ed.): Münsteraner Glossar zu Einheit und Vielfalt im Recht, 4. Ausgabe/ Münster Glossary on Legal Unity and Pluralism, 4th Edition (EViR Working Paper 11), Münster 2024, 24–26.

    Gosewinkel, Dieter, Rechtseinheit (Nationalstaat), in: Figueiredo/ Lieb/ Ludwig/ Mösch/ Oestmann/ Seebröker: Münsteraner Glossar zu Einheit und Vielfalt im Recht, 4th Edition, 145–147.

    Gosewinkel, Dieter, Eine Feinderklärung an die liberale Demokratie. Zu Maximilian Krah, Politik von rechts – Ein Manifest, in: Roth, Harald (Ed.): Verteidigt die Demokratie!, Bonn 2024, 128–135.

    Gosewinkel, Dieter, Die Blaupause aus Bonn. Wie das Grundgesetz anderen Verfassungen zum Vorbild wurde, in: ZEIT Geschichte 2 (2024), 112–113.

    Gosewinkel, Dieter, Eigentumsrecht und Moral. Kommentar zu Sophie Schönberger, ‚Eingefrorene Zeit‘, in: Zeitschrift für Wirtschafts- und Unternehmensethik 24 (2023), 251–255.

    Gosewinkel, Dieter, L’histoire politique au musée! L’exemple de la citoyenneté, in: Histoire & Politique 51 (2023), 1–9.

    Gosewinkel, Dieter, Staat ohne Souveränität. Die Bundesrepublik Deutschland, in: Maissen,Thomas/ May, Niels F./ Kiesow, Rainer M. (Ed.), Souveränität im Wandel. Frankreich und Deutschland. 14.-21. Jahrhundert, Göttingen 2023, 368–375.

    Gosewinkel, Dieter, Verfassung ohne Geschichtsschreibung, in: Augsberg, Ino/ Müller, Michael W. (Ed.): Theorie der Verfassungsgeschichte, Tübingen 2023, 149–164.

    Gosewinkel, Dieter, Struggles for Belonging. Citizenship in Europe, 1900–2020, Oxford 2021.

    Gosewinkel, Dieter, The Constitutional State, in: Pihlajamäki, Heikki/ Dubber, Markus/ Godfrey, Mark (Ed.), Oxford Handbook of European Legal History, Oxford 2018, 945–973.

    Gosewinkel, Dieter, Schutz und Freiheit? Staatsbürgerschaft in Europa im 20. und 21. Jahrhundert, Berlin 2016.

    Gosewinkel, Dieter/ Masing, Johannes, Die Verfassungen in Europa 1789–1949. Eine wissenschaftliche Textedition, München 2006.

    Gosewinkel, Dieter, Einbürgern und ausschließen. Die Nationalisierung der Staatsangehörigkeit vom Deutschen Bund bis zur Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Kritische Studien zur Geschichtswissenschaft 150), Göttingen 2003.

    Gosewinkel, Dieter/ Adolf Arndt, Die Wiederbegründung des Rechtsstaats aus dem Geist der Sozialdemokratie (1945–1961) (Politik- und Gesellschaftsgeschichte 25), Bonn 1991.