Research

Joschka Philipps is professor of sociology of insecurity and incertainty, with a focus on Africa, at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. His research explores themes of youth, urbanity, conflict, rumors, social movements and protests, as well as interpretations of global power structures through the lens of conspiracy suspicions. He is the Co-Director and Founding Member of the C³ Research Center on Conflict, Crisis and Change, and Representative of the Research Section “In/Securities” at Bayreuth’s Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence. From 2021 to 2025, Philipps headed the Junior Research Group “Politics of the Unknown” on conspiracism and conflict and worked as a Principal Investigator for the project “Fluid Ontologies of Contestation” (2023-25) on social media-based protest movements, both using interdisciplinary approaches that combined social science methodologies with artistic perspectives and data scientific methods, respectively. 

Philipps’s empirical work focuses on the Republic of Guinea as well as Uganda and Burkina Faso. It is methodically based on participant observation, interviews, discourse analysis, comparative methods, as well as surveys and descriptive statistics. As part of his interest in the relationships between conflict and uncertainty, he analyses how rumours and conspiracy theories act as conjectural tools that help people and groups transform uncertainty into collective points of reference that they can act upon. Previously, he worked on urban young men in Conakry, the capital city of Guinea, and the role that their collectives, so-called gangs, clans, and staffs, played in political protests, also in comparison with similar phenomena in other cities, such as Kampala and London.

Joschka Philipps is the author of ‘Ambivalent Rage. Youth Gangs and Political Protest in Conakry, Guinea’ (2013). He co-edited ‘La Guinée depuis Condé’ (2023) with Politique Africaine and ‘Education in Fragile Contexts: Government Practices and Political Challenges’ (2011). His articles have appeared in the Journal of African Political Economy, Africa Spectrum, and the Journal of Youth Studies, as well as in the Oxford Handbook of Global South Youth Studies. Previously, Philipps was a Senior Researcher at the Swiss Peace Foundation and a lecturer at the University of Basel. As a doctoral and postdoctoral fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation, he completed research fellowships at Columbia University in New York, at the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala, Sweden, at Les Afriques dans le Monde, Sciences Po Bordeaux, France, and at the Université de N’Zérékoré, Guinea. He also worked as a lecturer at the Université Joseph Ki-Zerbo (UJKZ) in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso (2023-24). Joschka Philipps holds a Magister (MA) in Political Science, Sociology and Psychology (University of Freiburg i.Br.), and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Basel, Switzerland.