leonhardtum

My name is dr Leonhardt van Efferink and I work at the School of Business and Economics of Maastricht University. My responsibilities include supervising theses, mentoring/tutoring students and coordinating courses. I am responsible for courses on the European Economy, Emerging Markets and Country Risk Analysis. Moreover, I have been organizing a course on Media Representations and Research Methods at Maastricht Summer School since 2014

Between 2010 and 2019, I wrote my PhD thesis on Geopolitics at Royal Holloway. Whether to use a method drawing on critical discourse analysis or news framing analysis was one of the most difficult struggles in this “analytical journey”. My thesis "Germany's ‘War on Terror' : Exploring Frames and Imaginations in Practical and Popular Geopolitics" investigates the framing of Germany's military presence in Afghanistan. More specifically, the thesis analyses how the news magazine Der Spiegel and five political parties framed Germany's ISAF mission (2002-2014). The identified geopolitical frame categories draw on the academic literature on geopolitics, geography, IR, political studies and Germany. My methodology combines geopolitical concepts such as national identity, national power and national security with constructivist and multimodal methods to study framing.

In 2012, the Geographical Journal published my article "Polar Partners or Poles Apart? On the discourses of two US think tanks on Russia's presence in the ‘High North’." The article examines the differences between Brookings Institution and Heritage Foundation regarding their representations of the Arctic, with a focus on Russia's regional involvement. I also wrote the article about Geopolitics in the Oxford Bibliographies. It contains reviews of over 150 publications in English, French, German and Dutch. Moreover, I am Founding Editor of Exploring Geopolitics. This website hosts 200+ contributions by 130+ scholars from 25+ countries.