The Research Department Migration, Integration, Transnationalization invites submissions for the 12th Annual Conference on Migration and Diversity, titled “The Cultural Evolution of #Migration and #Diversity.” The conference, organized by Steije Hofhuis, Ruud Koopmans, and Irene Pañeda-Fernández, will take place on September 25–26, 2026 at the WZB in Berlin.
WZB researcher Dana Burchardt has been a Heisenberg Fellow since last year. She is pursuing a research project entitled “Interacting Legal Spaces” in which she analyses how different international, regional, national and transnational legal spaces interrelate.
WZB researcher Johannes Gerschewski has been a Heisenberg Fellow since January 2026. He is conducting research in his new project “Democratic Self-Defense in Times of Autocratization”, where he explores how democracies can resist and revert ongoing autocratization processes. The Heisenberg Fellowship is funded by the German Research Foundation.
How do voters react to the emergence of new “radically progressive” parties perceived? A WZB study shows that the electoral success of new parties is leading to a countermovement towards conservative parties.
We congratulate WZB researcher Fabio Ellger and Heike Klüver for winning the Gordon Smith and Vincent Wright Memorial Prize 2025. Awarded by Taylor & Francis and the editors of West European Politics, the prize recognises their important analysis on the influence of radical right parties.
Controlling the digital public sphere is costly. To achieve this, authoritarian governments often rely on direct investments from other autocracies in Internet infrastructure, as shown in a new study by Lisa Garbe.
The WZB wishes you happy holidays and a good start to the New Year! The graphic illustrates the finding that democratization and autocratization processes spread in waves around the world.
High levels of inequality lead to an unrealistically optimistic view of opportunities for social advancement—a mechanism that stabilizes social inequality. This shows a new WZB study by Julia Baumann and Yiming Liu.
The Senate of the Leibniz Association attests to the excellent scientific achievements of the WZB in the evaluation report and recommends continued funding. The WZB is "one of the world's top research institutions in its domain."
