Dr. Ned Richardson-Little

complete CV (2022)

since April 2024
Research Associate at the ZZF Potsdam, Department V

October 2023 – March 2024
Associate Scientist at the ZZF Potsdam, Department V

2021 – 2025
Project Manager of the project funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, University of Erfurt (2021-2023) and ZZF (2023-2025): "Towards Illiberal Constitutionalism in East Central Europe: Historical Analysis in Comparative and Transnational Perspectives"

2019 – 2024
Junior Research Group Leader at the University of Erfurt - Volkswagen Foundation Freigeist Project: "The Other Global Germany: Transnational Criminality and Deviant Globalisation in the 20th Century"

2014 – 2018
Associate Research Fellow at the University of Exeter. "1989 after 1989: The Fall of State-Socialism in a Global Perspective", Leverhulme Trust supported project. Prof James Mark, Principal Investigator

2015
Leibniz Summer Fellow at the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung (ZZF), Potsdam
Official Commendation, Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History for "Between Dictatorship and Dissent: Ideology, Legitimacy, and Human Rights in East Germany, 1945-1990", Weiner Library, London

2014
Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize for "Between Dictatorship and Dissent: Ideology, Legitimacy, and Human Rights in East Germany, 1945-1990", German Historical Institute, Washington DC

2008 – 2013
PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill under the supervision of Prof. Konrad Jarausch: “Between Dictatorship and Dissent: Ideology, Legitimacy, and Human Rights in East Germany, 1945-1990”

2012
Research fellowships from the American Historical Association (Washington DC) and the DHI-Washington

2011
Research fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD)

2010 – 2011
Funding for the doctoral project by the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies – Freie Universität Berlin

2006 – 2008
M.A. History at McGill University (Montréal, Canada): “Imagining the Archipelago – Western Conceptions of the Gulag, 1923-2000”

2001 – 2005
B.A. in History and Politics at McGill University (Montréal, Canada)

Guns, Drugs, and Globalisation: The Rise of Illicit International Trade and the Boundaries of Germany in the World 1890-1940

This project explores the role of Germany in the rise of global arms and narcotics trafficking and the efforts to contain these illicit trades from the Kaiserreich to the Nazi Era. In the late^19th century, the proliferation of new avenues of global trade created a wave of moral panics and fears from state officials that uncontrolled cross-border flows threatened the social order within Europe and the colonial order in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. The two leading commodities that generated the greatest concern from state officials and moral crusaders were arms and drugs. A secondary market in the colonial world had exploded as European armies modernised and sought to profit from their obsolete arsenals while the global traffic in addictive medications such as cocaine, heroin and other opiate products raised the specter of the subversion of the colonial order through violent uprisings and social collapse. Through the lens of the emergence of international crime, this project aims to rethink the place of Germany in a globalising world order as it transitioned from an Empire to a democratic republic and finally to the tyranny of the Third Reich. The history of arms and drug trafficking provides a window into shifting cultural understandings of crime at home and how they were linked to international affairs, but also illuminates ambiguous boundaries of "Germany" as an entity in an interconnected world.

Subproject of the VolkswagenStiftung-project: The Other Global Germany: Transnational Criminality and Deviant Globalisation in the 20th Century

The Rights of the People: Human Rights, the Basic Law and the Far-Right since Reunification

Although commonly understood as opponents of the rule of law, constitutionalism and constitutional rights, in recent years, the German populist and far-right has sought to claim the mantle of the popular struggle for democracy the Basic Law, both historically and in the present. In order to distinguish itself from traditional far right ethnonationalism and avoid being surveilled or possibly banned as a threat to the free democratic order, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) has aimed to portray itself as the vehicle for the realisation of the promise of the liberal transition of 1989 and the protector of the basic rights of the German Volk. Positioning itself not as repudiation of the post-socialist liberal democratic transition, but as its natural heir the AfD and others in the far-right have sought to position any effort by to hinder the party in the name of preserving constitutional democracy as an extremist threat by the far-left, which threatens the rights of Germans and endangers the democratic transition from state socialism. This surface level commitment to constitutionalism also acts to cover völkisch legal theories that claim the rights of the Basic Law should apply only to members of the German Volk and see human rights protections as foreign interventions in the constitutional order imposed by globalist elites from Berlin, Karlsruhe or Brussels.

Subproject of the VolkswagenStiftung-project: Towards Illiberal Constitutionalism in East Central Europe: Historical Analysis in Comparative and Transnational Perspectives

• Human Rights
• International Law
• Globalisation
• International crime

Monograph

The Human Rights Dictatorship: Socialism, Global Solidarity and Revolution in East Germany, Cambridge et al. 2020.

(Co-)editorships

together with: Stokes, Lauren, Everyday Transnationalism, Global Entanglements and Regimes of Mobility at the Edges of East Germany Special Issue: Central European History 56 (2023). Available online here

(Re-)Constituting the State and Law during the 'Long Transformation of 1989' in East Central Europe. Special Issue Journal of Modern European History (forthcoming, 2020) together with Michal Kopeček.

together with: Dietz, Hella/ Mark, James, Socialism and Human Rights in East-Central Europe since 1945, Special issue: East Central Europe 46 (2019).

together with: Grosescu, Raluca, The Socialist World and Post-War International Criminal and Humanitarian Law, Special Issue: Journal of the History of International Law 21 (2019).

Articles and essays

Rights and Communism, in: Samuel Moyn and Meredith Terretta (eds.) The Cambridge History of Rights: Volume V: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2023.

Nehmt Menschenrechtsilliberalismus ernst! Vom Ge- und Missbrauch der Geschichte und der Schwierigkeit, diese zu schreiben, in: Johannes Haaf, Luise Müller, Esther Neuhann & Markus Wolf (Hg.) Die Grundlagen der Menschenrechte: moralisch, politisch oder sozial? Nomos Verlag, 2023.

Conclusion -- 1989: World-Historical Fracture and a Return to More of the Same, in: Kirrily Freeman/John Munro (eds.) Reading the New Global Order: Textual Transformations of 1989. Bloomsbury, 2022.

Arms Intervention: Weimar Germany, Imperial Influence and Weapons Trafficking in Warlord China, in: Journal of Modern European History 19:4 (2021), pp. 510-528)

Transnational Drug Trafficking and the German Embrace of International Narcotics Law from the Kaiserreich to the Nazis, in: Dietmar Müller and Katja Naumann (eds.) Transregional Connections in the History of East Central Europe. De Gruyter, 2021.

'Hashers Don't Read Das Kapital': East Germany, Socialist Prohibition, and Global Cannabis. In: James Mills and Lucas Richert (eds.) Cannabis: Global Histories. MIT Press, 2021.

together with Merrill, Samuel, Who is the Volk? PEGIDA and the Contested Memory of 1989 on Social Media, in: Samuel Merrill, Emily Keightley & Priska Daphi (eds.) Social Movements, Cultural Memory and Digital Media. Mobilising Mediated Remembrance, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.

together with: Kopeček, Michal, Introduction: (Re-)Constituting the State and Law during the 'Long Transformation of 1989' in East Central Europe, in: Journal of Modern European History 18 (2020), pp. 275-280.

From Tehran to Helsinki: The International Year of Human Rights 1968 and State Socialist Eastern Europe, in: Diplomatica: A Journal of Diplomacy and Society 1 (2019), pp. 180-201. Online
together with Dietz, Hella/ Mark, James, New Perspectives on Socialism and Human Rights in East Central Europe since 1945, in: Socialism and Human Rights in East-Central Europe since 1945, Special issue: East Central Europe 46 (2019), pp. 169-187.

The Failure of the Socialist Declaration of Human Rights: Ideology, Legitimacy, and Elite Defection at the End of State Socialism." in: Socialism and Human Rights in East-Central Europe since 1945, Special issue: East Central Europe 46 (2019), pp. 318-341. Online
Human Rights Movements and the Fall of the Berlin Wall: Explaining the Peaceful Revolution of 1989, in: Wildenthal, Lora/ Quataert, Jean (eds.) The Routledge History of Human Rights, Routledge 2019.

Abolishing the Exploitation of Man by Man: Socialism and Human Rights since Marx, in: Weinke, Annette/ Gosewinkel, Dieter (eds.) Menschenrechte und ihre Kritiker. Ideologies, Arguments, Effects, Göttingen 2019, pp. 141-156.

together with: Grosescu, Raluca, Revisiting State Socialist Approaches to International Criminal and Humanitarian Law: An Introduction, in: The Socialist World and Post-War International Criminal and Humanitarian Law, Special Issue: Journal of the History of International Law 21 (2019), pp.161-180.

The Drug War in a Land Without Drugs: East Germany and the Socialist Embrace of International Narcotics Law, in: The Socialist World and Post-War International Criminal and Humanitarian Law, Special Issue: Journal of the History of International Law 21 (2019), pp. 270-298.

Human Rights, Pluralism and the Democratisation of East and West Germany, in: Wenzel, Harald/ Jarausch, Konrad/ Goihl, Karin (eds.), Different Germans, Many Germanies: New Transatlantic Perspectives, New York et al. 2017, pp. 158-177.

Human Rights as Myth and History: Between the Revolutions of 1989 and the Arab Spring, in: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, 23 (2015), pp. 151-166.

Between Dictatorship and Dissent: Ideology, Legitimacy and Human Rights in East Germany, 1945-1990, in: German Historical Institute Bulletin 56 (2015), pp. 69-82. Online
Dictatorship and Dissent: Human Rights in East Germany in the 1970s, in: Eckel, Jan/ Moyn, Samuel (eds.), The Breakthrough: Human Rights in the 1970s, Philadelphia 2014, pp. 49-67.

„Erkämpft das Menschenrecht“ – Sozialismus und Menschenrechte in der DDR, in: Eckel, Jan/ Moyn, Samuel (Hg.), Moral für die Welt? Menschenrechtspolitik in den 1970er Jahren, Göttingen et al. 2012, pp. 120-143.

Reviews and conference reports

Molly Pucci, Security Empire: The Secret Police in Communist Eastern Europe. (Yale University Press, 2020) in German History, Vol. 40, No. 1 (2022), 140-141.

Craven Matthew, Sundhya Pahuja & Gerry Simpson (eds.): International Law and the Cold War. (Cambridge 2019) in the Zeitschrift für ausländisches öffentliches Recht und Völkerrecht/ Heidelberg Journal of International Law, Vol. 81, No. 1, (2021), 265-270.

"The History of the End of History", in "Debate on Philipp Ther's Europe since 1989," East Central Europe. (47: 2-3 2020).

Review of: Mark Hurst, British Human Rights Organisations and Soviet Dissent, 1965-1985, London 2016, in: Journal of Contemporary History 54 (2019), pp. 243-245.

Review of: Sandrine Kott, Communism Day-to-Day: State Enterprises in East German Society, Michigan 2014, in: H-German (2017). Online
Review of: Kate E. Tunstall (ed.), Self-Evident Truths? Human Rights and the Enlightenment, New York et al. 2012, in: Traces: The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History (2013), pp. 291-294.

Conference Report: Human Rights / Social Rights. The Twentieth Century Predicament, 02.12.2010-04.12.2010, Potsdam, in: H-Soz-u-Kult (2011). Online
Review of: John Rodden, Dialectics, Dogmas, and Dissent: Stories from East German Victims of
Human Rights Abuse, University Park: Pennsylvania State 2010, in H-Human Rights (2011). Online