Eva Johais
Current projects
War and Fun: Reconceptualizing Warfare and Its Experience (WARFUN)
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Interdisciplinary researcher with a home in International Studies and an interest in violence, conflict, and war and international interventions.
Eva Johais is Senior Researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI).
She holds a PhD in Political Science from the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences and studied political science, law and peace and conflict studies at the Philipps-University of Marburg and the University of Tehran. Since her studies she has extended her professional repertoire to theories and methods from social anthropology, sociology, cultural and media studies. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Germany, Ethiopia, and the United States.
Inspired by postcolonial perspectives, her notion of interventions covers various forms of global governance that intervene in social orders to realize desired goals including emergency relief, peace, development, or democracy. With a focus on the logics and effects of intervention practice, she has researched statebuilding, electoral assistance and humanitarian design. Her research on war is driven by the motivation to understand what makes collective violence possible. It explores how war is experienced and draws on critical approaches to the military, militarism, and militarisation. In the WARFUN project, she has investigated the role of humour in German soldier culture, the societal relation to war in Germany and the use of social media in the Russian-Ukrainian war. From 2026 to 2030, she leads the ERC-funded project “Hashtag-wars: The politics of war participation in the digital age”.
To promote political ethnography, she co-founded the Working Group Ethnographic Methods in Political Science of the German Political Science Association (DVPW).
Selected publications:
Schlagfertigkeit. A soldier skill. Critical Military Studies. 11 (3), 312-328.
‘The WARFUN Taboo.’ War & Society. 44 (1), 66-81.
‘Unleash the hounds!’: NAFO’s memetic war narrative on the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. Critical Studies on Security. with Mareike Meis.
Preserving interventionism: how professionalisation secures the survival of electoral assistance. Canadian Journal of Development Studies / Revue canadienne d'études du développement. 45 (4), 695-714.