About

Andreas Glaeser is a sociologist of culture with a particular interest in the construction of identities and knowledges. His work interlaces substantive interests with efforts to build social theory. His first book develops a theory of identity formation processes in the context of an ethnographic study of Germany's post-unification woes. He is currently finishing a book aiming at the development of a political epistemology which asks how people come to understand the world of politics from within their particular biographical trajectories and social milieus. The substantive focus of this book is the late socialist German state's effort to understand its citizens and to control the opposition as well as the opposition members' efforts to form their independent understanding of state socialism. He has begun work on a new project which studies the emergence of dominant understandings about Muslim immigrants in the interaction between contingent historical events, the cycles of electoral politics, everyday experiences and mass-mediated discourses in Germany, France and Britain.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Philosophy
• Law
• Environmental ethics

Selected publications

• A Question of Justice: The Roots of Populism’s Anti-cosmopolitanism in State Capture

  2025-07-22

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Right-wing populism around the world engages not only in anti-cosmopolitan rhetoric, but wherever in power, it implements policies detrimental to cosmopolitan ideals, practices, and institutions. This chapter traces right-wing populisms’ anti-cosmopolitanism to their communal ethics, which form the centerpiece of their appeal. It further inquires into the rhetorical form and renewed attraction of communal ethics and finds them in a state that, captured by special interests, is in populists’ perception no longer capable to govern justly on behalf of and for the benefit of the people. Using the United States as its paradigmatic case, it shows, moreover, how the international business cosmopolitanism of the neoliberal era, which was first forged with American business elites in its vanguard, is ironically deeply implicated in generating its populist nemesis in the form of Republican party populism. The chapter concludes by raising questions about what sort of institutions can hold actors accountable for their local and translocal responsibilities such that future cosmopolitanisms avoid the shortcomings of global business cosmopolitanism. It finds those in more robust participatory democratic institutions that can safeguard against state capture.

  PublisherDOI

• Driving Toward Nuclear War: Interinstitutional Dynamics in the Cuban Missile Crisis and What we Might Learn From Them

  Social Science History · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The scandal of the Cuban Missile Crisis lies in the fact that it brought the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war for actions associated with relatively minor strategic and political gains. In this article I will treat this crisis as a diagnostic event to identify two significant interinstitutional dynamics that drove Nikita Khrushchev and President John F. Kennedy to this rationality-defying precipice. The first of these dynamics explores the consequences of transitioning military units from peacetime routines to crisis-level field deployment, which quickly created considerable command-and-control problems for both political leaders. Yet each believed that the other side remained in control of its forces, erroneously understanding local action by the other side as strategic moves ordered by central command. This created the potential for uncontrollable escalation. The second dynamic resulted from the interaction of two institutional arrangements in the United States. American presidents are simultaneously the country’s highest decision makers in foreign affairs and political campaigners interested in their own reelection. Foreign policy decisions thus become potential campaign moves. After World War II, a campaigning tradition emerged in which both parties felt compelled to outdo each other with anticommunist rhetoric and policies. This strategy built on deeply instituted anticommunism in the electorate, which politicians felt compelled to further cultivate. This dynamic significantly limited Kennedy’s response options, making it more likely than not that he would have called for an invasion of Cuba if Khrushchev had not backed down. The consequences would have been disastrous. The article concludes with tentative lessons to learn from these two dynamics.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Till Hilmar. Deserved: Economic Memories After the Fall of the Iron Curtain. New York: Columbia University Press, 2023. 263 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Tables. $140.00, hard bound. $35.00, paper.

  Slavic Review · 2024-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Ethics’ Political Imperative: Moving Toward Better Institutions

  Evangelische Verlagsanstalt eBooks · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  PublisherDOI

• Front Matter

  American Journal of Sociology · 2020-07-01

  paratextOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 4 Theorizing the Present Ethnographically

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2018-07-06

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Culture and identity

  2018-11-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Many of the problems riddling the debates about adequate conceptualizations of culture and identity can be avoided by moving to a metatheoretical level of analysis which grasps “all that can recognizably differ” between social arrangements and persons (sensory, discursive, and emotive understandings, practices, habits, social relations etc.) as institutions emerging co-constitutively from within the effect flows of interconnected activities. The metatheory offered here explains how to analyze these processes of co-constitution in some detail. It describes the boundaries of social arrangements as emerging from breaks in effect flows. It differentiates the societal as totality of interconnected flows reproducing arrangements as a whole from the cultural reproducing only the activity guiding understandings within that whole. It reveals the incongruity between these two flows as producing feedback gaps best seen as cultural externalities. It suggests further that cultural dynamics emerge from attempts to address the problems emerging from cultural externalities. Moreover, the model understands the cultural not as the result of sharing, but as entanglement in co-constitutive dynamics. Finally, it enables the analysis of the political uses of the terms culture and identity by showing how they are deployed to simultaneously particularize and generalize in laying descriptive and moral claims on others.

  PublisherDOI

• Action in Society: Reflexively Conceptualizing Activities

  Handbooks of sociology and social research · 2016-01-01 · 4 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Globalizing Knowledge: Intellectuals, Universities, and Publics in Transformation

  Contemporary Sociology A Journal of Reviews · 2016-10-18 · 55 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Hermeneutic Institutionalism: Towards a New Synthesis

  Qualitative Sociology · 2014-04-11 · 20 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Michael Humphrey

  49 shared

• Georg Henriksen

  49 shared

• Daniel Breslau

  49 shared

• Andrew Davidson

  Royal Children's Hospital

  49 shared

• Van Griffith

  49 shared

• Ferid Agani

  University of Prishtina

  49 shared

• Ralph Cintrón

  49 shared

• Elissa Dresden

  49 shared