Tim Luecke

Background

Welcome! I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Political Science Department at Ohio State University. The general focus of my research rests on International Relations Theory, International Security, Foreign Policy, and qualitative methods. My areas of expertise are Western Europe and North America, with a focus on American and German foreign policy. In addition, I am interested in the debate between modern and post-modern political theory in context of the empirical and normative dimensions of global governance.

A native of Germany, I spent my early youth in Cologne before I attended college at the University of Chicago from 2000 – 2004. During my time in Chicago, I studied structural realism under John Mearsheimer and wrote my BA thesis under the guidance of Alexander Wendt on the problem of uncertainty in IR theory. Since 2005, I have been a graduate student at Ohio State University.

Work in Progress

Remaking the World:
The Generation of World War I and the
End of American Isolationism
—
The Fifth Generation and the Future
of Chinese Foreign Policy (with Xiaoyu Pu)
—
Why and How We Should Create
a New Global Generation

‘Pracademic’ Work

Creating the Next Global Generation
—

My central goal as a scholar is to produce cutting-edge academic research which at the same time is applicable to political practice and contemporary problems in international politics. Currently, the political and economic principles of Western liberalism are being challenged by international terrorism and the global economic crisis, and youths around the world are challenging the legitimacy of older generations and of elites in power.

Synthesizing my own work on political generations, theoretical work and empirical research on the value of Habermas’ notion of deliberation, and the ever-increasing power of social networks and new forms of media, I recently started a group of young professionals and political activists, which seeks to channel this increase in political activism by young people around the world into a lasting engagement for local and global democracy through the creation of a new Global Generation. The core of this project will consist of a global network which will allow young people around the world to deliberate on the issues that will determine their future. This project therefore constitutes a contribution to the recent wave of ‘pracademic’ work in Political Science, which seeks to apply academic research to real-world contexts.

Research

Generations:
A New Unit of Analysis for the Study
of Politics Across Time
—

My dissertation, written under the guidance of Alexander Wendt (chair), Richard Herrmann, and Randall Schweller, examines the role of generations and generational change in international politics. Across the world, youth protests and generational movements have captured wide-spread attention over the last couple years.

In the wake of the terror attacks on September 11, 2001, the economic crisis of 2008, and the Arab Spring in 2011, political commentators have proclaimed the emergence of new generations. Underlying this widespread interest in generations is the assumption that generational change provides a powerful mechanism for large-scale shifts in politics and, possibly, foreign policy. However, the discipline of International Relations has little to contribute to this debate since no systematic treatment of the role of generations in international politics exists to date.

My dissertation fills this theoretical gap in two steps. First, I argue that a generation constitutes a temporal unit of analysis which captures how people experience the course of history at different stages in their life and how this experience shapes their political worldviews and actions. In the second step, I develop a theory of political generations according to which alternations between ‘radical’ and ‘traditional’ political generations account for cycles of political change and stability.

‘Radical’ political generations come to question the legitimacy of elites and the established political culture in response to a set of formative events and turn into agents of social and political change. ‘Traditional’ generations, on the other hand, perceive the response of elites to formative events as successful and therefore reproduce the established political culture when they come to power. The empirical chapters of the dissertation apply this theoretical framework to three research areas in foreign policy and international relations.

In the third chapter, I apply the theory of political generations to an analysis of U.S. foreign policy from 1900 until 2008 and argue that the alternation between radical and traditional generations explains cycles of foreign policy change and stability. The fourth chapter shows the significance of generational processes for the transmission of knowledge across time in a study of the development of collective memories in West Germany from 1945 until the present.

The fifth chapter constitutes an in-depth study of trans-national dimensions of the ‘1960s Generation’ in both the United States and Germany, and argues that political generations can be powerful sources of change at the level of the international system. The empirical analyses rely on a range of qualitative methods, including process tracing, archival research, and personal interviews with foreign policy makers in both Germany and the United States. Currently, my research is funded by the Mershon Center for International Security and the Francis Auman Award for Graduate Research.