The Centre for Fundamental Rights at the Hertie School, is seeking applications for a fully funded PhD position, as part of the research project COLLISIONS led by Violeta Moreno Lax, Professor of International Law at the Hertie School and the Director of the School's Centre for Fundamental Rights.
The successful candidate will be enrolled in the Doctoral Programme in Governance at the Hertie School. The fellowship is available from 1 September 2026.
About the COLLISIONS project
Values - and, in particular, value clashes - are very salient in highly politicised areas, such as war and security, climate change, or migration and forced displacement, which pose key, interlocking challenges to the international community. Values and value collisions influence political and legal processes, can determine election outcomes, and reshape governance systems. They polarise public opinion and may give rise to democratic backlash. This is reflected in different governance mechanisms, including judicial decision-making, to which this project will pay particular attention.
Against this background, research within this project will examine which values matter and why, which role values play, and how clashes between them can and/or should be approached from a law & governance perspective. It will, in this way, complement ongoing research within the CFR and contribute to building a more responsive and resilient international value-based order.
About the PhD Position
The PhD candidate is expected to carry out research examining the complex dynamics between competing values (as defined above) in one of the following areas:
(1) war and security, (2) climate change, or (3) migration and forced displacement.
Projects looking at the judicial reasoning of human rights courts and treaty bodies, and/or at contestation processes between different actors advancing different positions on the basis of different values or different understandings of the values at hand and the norms they substantiate, and/or looking at the ways in which value conflicts are addressed in law, policy and/or practice are particularly welcome.
The disciplinary perspective may be law, norms research (especially in IR), law and politics, or law and governance. All methodological approaches, including socio-legal, criticaltheoretical, philosophical, empirical, including ethnographic and anthropological, as well as doctrinal are welcome.
The successful candidate will conduct this PhD research under the supervision of Violeta Moreno-Lax, Professor of International Law and Director of the Centre for Fundamental rights at the Hertie School, and other supervisors under the structured scheme of the PhD programme at the Hertie School.
Qualifications
We invite PhD candidates with exceptionally strong academic track records at undergraduate and master’s level (or equivalent) in law, politics or cognate disciplines, with a strong demonstrated interest in research of human rights theories, law, policy, and/or institutions.
The deadline for applications is 31 January 2026 11:59 pm CET. The reference letters must be submitted no later than 15 February 2026.
For Information about the required application documents see here.
For more information about Doctoral Programmes at Hertie School see here.
Apply using this link.
For questions regarding the COLLISIONS research project, please, contact Professor Violeta Moreno-Lax. For other questions, please, contact the CFR Centre Manager, Dr Michal Kramer.