Vita

Maria-Gabriela Manea, M.A. is lecturer and research associate at the Department of Political Science, Chair of International Politics, Prof. Dr. Jürgen Rüland. In October 2009 she accomplished in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Jürgen Rüland a research project (funded by German Peace Research Foundation, DSF) on ‘Parliaments and Security Sector Governance’. She is currently a lecturer at the Department of Political Science and coordinator of the interdisciplinary Southeast Asian Studies Centre at the University of Freiburg. Her academic interests are with theories of international relations (social constructivism), human rights, globalization (inter-regionalism) and international change, regional integration in Southeast Asia as well as discourse analysis.

Gabriela studied political science (liecenta) and international relations (MA) at the University of Bucharest (Romania). In 2004 she completed her Master's in Social Sciences under the Global Studies Programme at the Albert-Ludwigs University Freiburg. She was awarded the ‘Heinrich-Popitz Prize for the Best Graduate in Social Sciences 2004’ of the Philosophical Faculty, Albert-Ludwigs University Freiburg. Since WS 2004/05 she has been pursuing her PhD in International Relations. From 2003 to 2006 she worked as a student assistant in the Global Studies Programme, and since summer term 2007 she has been teaching at the Department of Political Science. She held scholarships from the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) and the Konrad-Adenauer Foundation.

She carried out several fieldworks in Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines) and Nigeria. She conducted qualitative interviews with academics, experts and decision-makers in the fields of human rights and the ASEAN as well as in the field of security sector and parliaments in Indonesia and Nigeria. She was a visiting researcher at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore (ISEAS) (2005) and at Universitas Indonesia (FISIP), Jakarta (2008, 2009).

Fields of Interest

• Theories of international relations (social constructivism)
• Identity and norms (human rights) in international politics
• Globalization (inter-regionalism) and international change
• Regional integration in Southeast Asia (human rights, democratization and security)
• Qualitative research methods (discourse analysis, comparative methods)

Teaching

Presentations and Conference Papers

2010

• Talk on"Parliamentary Oversight and Civilian Control of the Armed Forces in Indonesia and Nigeria" (Freiburg, 24.06.2010), Arnold-Bergstrasser-Institut Freiburg.

2009

• “How much an actor and under which logics of action: Parliaments in the military reform in Indonesia and Nigeria”, conference paper co-authored with Prof. Dr. Jürgen Rüland, ECPR Congress Potsdam, 10-12 September 2009
• Co-organizer together with Prof. Dr. Jürgen Rüland of the Conference Section on “Security Sector Reform and Democratic Consolidation”, ECPR Congress Potsdam, 10-12 September 2009

2008

• “Human Rights in Indonesia: between regional integration and domestic change”, Paper presented at the KAS Workshop ’60 Years of Human Rights’, University of Freiburg
• “European Human Rights Regime”, Paper given in the Research Colloquium of the FISIP/Universitas Indonesia, Jakarta

2007

• “Human Rights and ASEAN”, Paper given at the international Conference ’40 Years of ASEAN: towards the Fifth Decade’, University of Freiburg

Projects

Coordinator of the interdisciplinary BMBF Project "Southeast Asian Studies: Grounding Area Studies in Social Practice" (15 November 2009-31 October 2013)

The project pursues an interdisciplinary concept of research on Southeast Asia involving four disciplines Political Science, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Economics and Asian History. Participating scholars conceptualize Area Studies as relational and pursue transculturally-oriented research beyond Orientalism and Occidentalism.

Their research focuses on everyday social practice in its complex plurality and sociocultural diversity. This is connected to cultural transfer and localization processes.

The mandala concept of Southeast Asian Studies at Freiburg is designed as a program composed of concentric circles radiating from an interdisciplinary and international research and teaching program.Other components such as methodology training, regional networking, graduate studies, the alumni program and policy oriented knowledge transfer are closely linked with the research core.

Main research topics:

• Democratization as a multilayered process of regional, national and sub-national levels
• Concepts of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’
• Decentralization from economic, political and cultural perspectives
• Southeast Asian Regionalism

www.southeastasianstudies.uni-freiburg.de

Research Projects (together with Prof. Dr. Jürgen Rüland)

The research project “Parliaments and Security Sector Governance” is a comparative study based on extensive fieldworks on the role played by Parliaments in the establishment of democratic oversight of the armed forces in new democracies, such as Indonesia and Nigeria. The study examines under which conditions parliaments effectively contribute to the democratic reform of the armed forces. For it traces the ‘modes’ of interaction between the parliament and the military during the reform process. Detailed examination of interaction within relevant issue-areas - such as legislation and constitutional review, procurement, defence budgeting, human rights and military justice, etc. – are the core of a methodology based on small case studies analysis by means of process-tracing.

Dissertation Project

„Asian-European Interregional Dialogues on Human Rights: ASEAN-EU relations and ASEM“ is the working title of Gabriela’s doctoral dissertation. Theoretically, the thesis works with a social constructivist framework accounting for collective identity, region-building through inter-regionalism and human rights norms diffusion. The main argument is that the EU-ASEAN and ASEM interregional dialogues on human rights have opened up a process of intra-regional communication on human rights in Southeast Asia that fosters ASEAN’s regional identity construction. The study thus looks into ‘interactions’ and ‘discourses’ on human rights, which are simultaneously embedded within several levels of the international system (global, inter- and intraregional, domestic), as part of and in relation to the constitution of ASEAN’s regional identity. Interactive and discursive fields correspond to micro and macro-structures of collection identity building (Wendt 1994, 1999). State and non-state actors as well as official and societal contributions to inter- and intraregional dialogues on human rights are the focus of an in-depth analysis of ‘modes’ of interaction and of discourse analysis that includes newspapers, policy documents, interviews and scholarly texts.

Main Publications

For a list of selected publications of the seminar, please click here

• Manea, M.G. (2009): How and why interaction matters: ASEAN's regional identity and human rights, Cooperation and Conflict. In: Journal of the Nordic International Studies Association, Vol. 44 (1): 27–49 (refereed).
• Manea, M.G. (2008): Human rights and the interregional dialogue between Asia and Europe: ASEAN-EU relations and ASEM. In: The Pacific Review, Vol. 21(3): 369–396 (refereed)