Prof. Dr. Timothy Williams

Timothy Williams is trained in Comparative Politics and Conflict Studies. His research and teaching focuses on insecurity and social order formation. His research engages with conflict, violence, and the politics of memory, building on qualitative fieldwork in Southeast Asia and East Africa, and NLP and big data methods in digital space in collaboration with colleagues. His first book The Complexity of Evil. Perpetration and Genocide deals with motivations of perpetrators to engage in genocide. Another book is under contract with Bristol University Press and will take a comparative look at the politics of memory in different post-conflict countries and analyze how power can be exercised from attributions of roles (perpetrator, victim, hero, ....).

After studying political science in Mannheim and comparative politics at the London School of Economics, Timothy Williams completed his PhD at the Center for Conflict Studies at Philipps University in Marburg. This was later awarded the Philipps University Marburg Doctoral Award and the Gert Sommer Award of the Forum Friedenspsychologie.

He is Co-Chairman of the RISK Research Center at University of the Bundeswehr Munich, and Senior Researcher in the project SPARTA: Society, Politics and Risk with Twitter Analysis, where he leads the use case on riots, applying his expertise on violence dynamics and perpetrators to SPARTA’s computational social science approaches.

Timothy Williams is vice president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars.