The Jean Monnet Chair in EU External Economic Relations at Osteuropa-Institut, Prof. Dr. Theocharis Grigoriadis, would like to invite you to Prof. Jeffrey Kopstein's talk on his new book The Assault on the State, written together with Steve Hanson.

Across  the world, in countries as diverse as Hungary, Israel, and the U.S.,  attacks on the modern state and its workforce are intensifying. These attacks are led by self-aggrandizing politicians who attempt to  seize control of the state for themselves and their cronies. What  replaces the modern state —professional  government agencies organized  under the rule of law— once it is fatally undermined is an earlier, more destructive form of politics: the rule of men. In a  lecture based on his new book with Stephen Hanson, The Assault on the State: How the Global Attack on Modern Government Endangers Our Future, Jeffrey Kopstein describes the dangers of state erosion and outlines a strategy that can reverse this destructive trend.

Jeffrey Kopstein is Dean’s Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. In his research, Professor Kopstein focuses on interethnic violence, voting patterns of minority groups, antisemitism, and anti-liberal tendencies in civil society. These interests are central topics in his latest books, Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust (Cornell University Press, 2018), Politics, Memory, Violence: The New Social Science of the Holocaust (Cornell University Press, 2023), and The Assault on the State: How the Global Attack on Modern Government Endangers our Future (Polity, 2024).

Date: 30.04.2025
Time: 12 p.m.
Place: Room L 115, Seminarzentrum, Otto-von-Simson-Straße 26