Dr. Bettina Bruns

Researcher, IfL

• A2: Irregular Armed Units and the State in Eastern Europe – Workshop (with Jan C. Behrends, ZZF)

Bettina Bruns is a senior researcher and vice coordinator of the research group “Geographies of Belonging and Difference” at IfL where she studies the paramilitary production of security in local social contexts in Poland.

Bettina Bruns studied cultural studies, sociology, and anthropology at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), the Universidad de Chile, Santiago de Chile, and the Uniwersytet Wrocławski in Poland. She completed her doctoral studies at the Faculty of Sociology at the University of Bielefeld. Bruns held positions as research assistant at the Institute for Applied Research for Family, Children and Youth at the University of Potsdam and at the Institute for World Society Studies at the University of Bielefeld.

• Security and borders
• Critical military geography
• Qualitative empirical social studies and ethnography

Bruns, Bettina. Security through emotions: narratives of temporal and spatial belongings of the Polish Territorial Defence Forces. In: Canadian Slavonic papers, 64 (2022), 4, pp. 445-467

Bruns, Bettina. Homogenous and extra-territorial border regime? Migrations and control efforts across the Eastern EU external border. In: Journal of borderlands studies, 34 (2019), 4, pp. 509-526

Bruns, Bettina; Happ, Dorit. The EU and its “ring of friends” – eye-level or top-down relationships? How the EU’s external governance is perceived by local experts in Belarus and Ukraine. In: Problems of post-communism, 64 (2016), 2, pp. 94-105