Beverly Crawford

Beverly Crawford Ames is Professor Emerita of Political Science and Political Economy at the University of California, Berkeley and the former Director and current Honorary Chair of Berkeley’s Center for German and European Studies. She also served as the Co-Director of the UC European Union Center of Excellence and Associate Director of the Institute of European Studies. She was named a Fellow of the Turkish National Science Foundation (2015) and Senior Fellow of the Hertie School of Governance (2016). She is currently working on a monograph with the working title: "No Risk, No Life:" The Four Precarious Lives of an Asylum Seeker. It is a comparative study of asylum seekers’ experience as they make their way to refuge and confront the challenges of integration in Germany and the United States. A second project is tentatively entitled: “Immigration Policy and Politics in a Post-Truth Environment: Comparing the United States and Germany.” It examines how anti-immigration narratives—largely resting on false claims and purveyed through social media-- provide the foundation and central animus for the rise of the extreme nativist right in Germany and the U.S., why those narratives strongly resonate with certain segments of the population in both countries, and how different historical, cultural, and institutional factors have given rise to divergent political responses. Her previous books include Power and German Foreign Policy: Embedded Hegemony in Europe, (Palgrave Macmillan 2007), and Economic Vulnerability in International Relations, (Columbia University Press, 1993). Recent peer reviewed journal articles focus on Germany and the refugee crisis, Germany and the euro crisis, and German public opposition to TTIP. She has written policy papers, articles, and a co-edited book on the causes of cultural conflict in Europe, Greece, Bulgaria, and the former Yugoslavia. She has also written for Cicero, Magazin fuer Politische Kultur, The Encyclopedia of Global Studies, The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary German Politics and Culture, and she is a regular contributor to the Berkeley Blog. In the summer of 2015, she became an "accidental volunteer" along with colleagues from Yasar University, providing aid to refugees living on the streets in Izmir, Turkey.  In 2016, she was a German tutor for refugees in Berlin, and in 2017, she traveled to the Middle East to research the refugee situation in Israel and Jordan.