Politics and International Relations
Johannes Karreth
Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations
Johannes Karreth joined the Politics and International Relations Department at Ursinus College in the Fall of 2016. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Colorado Boulder with a concentration in international relations, methodology and comparative politics. Prior to coming to Ursinus, he was an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy at the University at Albany.
Dr. Karreth specializes in the study of international institutions and examines their role in resolving conflicts in different issue areas. His core research investigates how international institutions such as the World Bank have changed the dynamics of conflict and cooperation in political disputes between and within countries. His book Incentivizing Peace (Oxford University Press, 2018) explores how international institutions can prevent civil wars.
In other research, he studies how international and domestic politics interact, for instance how citizens react to visible aspects of globalization including immigration and changes in political parties’ ideological positions.
Dr. Karreth also studies and teaches social science research methods, especially Bayesian modeling and data visualization. He has taught workshops on quantitative social science at the University of Michigan, University of Essex (UK), University of Copenhagen, and National University of Singapore.
At Ursinus, Dr. Karreth advises the Model United Nations program, facilitating student’s participation in the annual National Model United Nations conference in New York City.
Research with students
Since 2021, Dr. Karreth has been working with students in the Aid and Peace Research Group on analyzing the impact of foreign aid on the negotiation and implementation of peace agreements after civil wars. Current research opportunities for students include projects on:
- the pathway to sustainable peace agreements after civil war
- consent of conflict parties to UN peacekeeping missions
- gender gaps in public opinion toward globalization
Recent Honors theses supervised
Dr. Karreth prioritizes working with students on their independent research. A selection of recent projects includes:
- Rachel Arthur: Why do some INGOs engage in conflict settings while other leave? (2023)
- Annabel Baldy: Assessing forest governance and influence in Brazil, the DRC, and Indonesia (2023)
- Emelyn Rodriguez: Women in Politics and Democratic Consolidation (2022)
- Joshua Grahame: The politics and economics of feed-in tariffs (2022)
- Jacob Kang: The politics of asylum policy in France (2021)
- Charlotte Rohrer: Foreign aid and political violence – The cases of Nigeria and Sierra Leone (2019)
Department
Degrees
Ph.D., University of Colorado Boulder
Teaching
Recent courses (syllabi are available on my website):
- International Politics
- The Politics of Markets, Money, and Migration (International Political Economy)
- Terrorism and Political Violence Around the World
- Thinking with Data in Politics & International Relations
- War and Peace
- International Organizations: Introduction to the United Nations and Multilateral Diplomacy
- Common Intellectual Experience
- Politics of the End of the World (coming Fall 2023…)
Research Interests
- International conflict and cooperation
- International organizations
- Political violence
- Public opinion and globalization
- Social science research methods
Recent Work
Book
Tir, Jaroslav and Johannes Karreth. 2018. Incentivizing Peace: How International Organizations Can Help Prevent Civil Wars in Member Countries. New York: Oxford University Press.
Peer-reviewed journal articles
Karreth, Johannes, Jason Quinn, Madhav Joshi, and Jaroslav Tir. 2023. “International Third Parties and the Implementation of Comprehensive Peace Agreements After Civil War.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 67 (2-3): 494-521.
Karreth, Johannes, Jaroslav Tir, and Douglas M. Gibler. 2022. “Latent Territorial Threat and Democratic Regime Reversals.” Journal of Peace Research 59 (2): 197-212
Karreth, Johannes, Patricia Sullivan, and Ghazal Dezfuli. 2020. “Explaining How Human Rights Protections Change After Internal Armed Conflicts.” Journal of Global Security Studies 5 (2): 248-264.
Sullivan, Patricia and Johannes Karreth. 2019. “Strategies and Tactics in Armed Conflict: How Governments and Foreign Interveners Respond to Insurgent Threats.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 63 (9): 2207-2232.
Karreth, Johannes. 2018. “The Economic Leverage of International Organizations in Interstate Disputes.” International Interactions 44 (3): 463-490.
Karreth, Johannes and Jaroslav Tir. 2018. “International Agreement Design and the Moderating Role of Domestic Bureaucratic Quality: The Case of Freshwater Cooperation.” Journal of Peace Research 55 (4): 460-475.
Karreth, Johannes, Shane P. Singh, and Szymon M. Stojek. 2015. “Explaining Attitudes toward Immigration: The Role of Regional Context and Individual Predispositions.” West European Politics 38 (6): 1174-1202. (Part of a WEP virtual special issue on Immigration and Integration.)
Sullivan, Patricia and Johannes Karreth. 2015. “The Conditional Impact of Military Intervention on Internal Armed Conflict Outcomes.” Conflict Management and Peace Science 32 (3): 269-288.
Karreth, Johannes and Jaroslav Tir. 2013. “International Institutions and Civil War Prevention.” Journal of Politics 75 (1): 96-109.
Karreth, Johannes, Jonathan Polk, and Christopher Allen. 2013. “Catchall or Catch and Release? The Electoral Consequences of Social Democratic Parties’ March to the Middle in Western Europe.” Comparative Political Studies 46 (7), 791-822. (Blog post at the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage)
Stinnett, Douglas, Bryan Early, Cale Horne, and Johannes Karreth. 2011. “Complying by Denying: Explaining Why States Develop Nonproliferation Export Controls.” International Studies Perspectives 12 (3), 308-326.
Software
Scogin, Shana, Johannes Karreth, Andreas Beger, and Rob Williams. 2019. “BayesPostEst: An R Package to Generate Postestimation Quantities for Bayesian MCMC Estimation.” Journal of Open Source Software 4 (42): 1722.
Current research
Available on my website.