Magdalena König

Magdalena König serves as a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law (MPIL) in Heidelberg, Germany, affiliated with the MAGGI Research Group since 2024. Previously, she completed her PhD at the University of Groningen's Department of International Relations / Centre for International Relations Research (CIRR) under the International Relations and Security Studies (IRSS) chair group (2019-2023).

Her academic credentials include:

• PhD in International Relations, University of Groningen (2024)
• MA in Peace Research and International Politics, University of Tübingen (2019)
• BA in European Studies, University of Maastricht (2015)

Dr. König's research critically examines EU Foreign Policy through the lens of EU Enlargement and Counter-Terrorism, with particular focus on Radicalisation Prevention in South East Europe and Cyprus. Her work in Critical Security Studies investigates how preventive security frameworks depoliticize policy decisions and produce risk narratives, especially regarding socio-digital bordering practices and enlargement conditionality. She employs multi-sited ethnographic methods to analyze the spatio-temporal dimensions of security governance.

Recent publications demonstrate consistent analytical focus on securitization processes within EU external relations, revealing how counter-terrorism frameworks reshape enlargement politics and border management through risk governance. Her scholarship exposes the ambiguous implications of EU policies on territorial division and social sorting systems.

Dr. König has supervised Master's theses (Leadership Lab, 2021) and delivered guest lectures on Constructivism and Digital Ethnography at Groningen. She co-convened the Netherlands-wide International Political Sociology seminar series (2022-2023) and organized the IRSS research colloquium, demonstrating active academic leadership beyond traditional advising roles.

As a core member of MPIL's MAGGI Research Group, she contributes to cutting-edge research on global governance architectures and their intersection with security practices in evolving geopolitical contexts.