PhD in International Relations

Fully funded PhD position in International Relations at the Faculty of Arts, University of Groningen (start date: September/October 2025) in the project “Unbounding the Arab World: Anti-colonial geopolitics, transnational territorial imaginations and post-imperial worldmaking, c. 1908-1977”.

This PhD project offers a unique opportunity to work in an international, diverse environment and to acquire valuable research experience at a top-ranked university. The successful candidate will have the opportunity to develop their academic writing skills, undertake archival work, gain teaching experience and develop career skills. The candidate will be embedded in the Chair Group of History and Theory of International Relations and in the Middle Eastern Studies department. The supervision team will be comprised of Dr Karim El Taki and Dr António Ferraz de Oliveira (as daily supervisors) and Dr Benjamin Herborth (as promotor).

The PhD Project
In the early twentieth century, as the Ottoman Empire struggled to reform and was increasingly targeted by European imperial predations, many intellectuals across its provinces were moved to envision new territorial states and post-imperial unions. As the Ottoman Empire disintegrated, and many countries fell under colonial control and trusteeship, Arab intellectuals developed distinctive arguments for a form of anti-colonial geopolitics, with various pan-nationalist visions of international federations fashioning new ideas of territorial reorganisation and postcolonial worldmaking. This PhD project explores this broad context, connecting a transnational intellectual history of pan-movements in the Middle East and North Africa with regards to geopolitical and territorial imaginations. Running from the 1908 Young Turk Revolution to the dissolution of the Federation of Arab Republics in 1977, the project connects and contrasts networked intellectuals from different countries in the region, retracing a severely understudied history of geopolitical imagination. The project examines how various pan-ideologies – including pan-Arabism, pan-Islamism, pan-Africanism, pan-Syrianism, and pan-Maghrebism – competed, overlapped, and influenced each other in their visions of territorial imaginations. This project speaks to recent developments in international relations scholarship, recovering a global history of international thought beyond the West, with particular attention to the anticolonial origins of twentieth-century ideas of self-determination, sovereignty, and world order but also the entangled post-imperial visions of pan-Asianism, pan-Islamism, pan Africanism and other transnational movements (Manela, 2007; Aydin, 2017; Getachew, 2019, Burbank and Cooper, 2024). This project will contribute valuably to this literature by providing a detailed study of how anticolonial pan–nationalist thinkers engaged with the prospect of remaking the region’s territorial order and mobilising forms of subaltern geopolitics against hegemonic pretenders.

The PhD candidate will be able to develop their own research within the framework of the broader project. Specifically, they will be asked to

- Conduct research independently.
- Carry out archival research digital and on-field.
- Present research at academic conferences and prepare publications.
- Carry out teaching duties (0.4 FTE spread over the second, third and fourth year).
- Complete the PhD in the specified timeframe (4 years).

Organisation
Since its foundation in 1614, the University of Groningen has established an international reputation as a dynamic and innovative university offering high-quality teaching and research. Its 34,000 students are encouraged to develop their own individual talents through challenging study and career paths. The University of Groningen is an international centre of knowledge: It belongs to the best research universities in Europe and is allied with prestigious partner universities and networks worldwide.

The Faculty of Arts is a large, dynamic faculty in the heart of the city of Groningen. It has more than 5,000 students and 700 staff members, who are working at the frontiers of knowledge every day. The Faculty offers a wide range of degree programmes: 15 Bachelor's programmes and over 35 Master's specialisations. Our research, which is internationally widely acclaimed, covers Archaeology, Cultural Studies, History, International Relations, Language and Literary Studies, Linguistics and Media and Journalism Studies.