Dr. Jan Niklas Rolf

Jan Niklas Rolf was born on the Lower Rhine. He holds a bachelor's degree in Political Science and Economics from RWTH Aachen University and a master's and doctoral degree in International Relations from the University of London. After his doctoral thesis on the domestic analogy, exploring the normative foundations of theories of global order and justice, he turned to their practical implications. His research on development cooperation, security policy and other current issues in (international) politics has been published in peer-reviewed journals, edited volumes and monographs.

Jan Niklas Rolf worked as a researcher at FernUniversität in Hagen and Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf. He has also been a guest lecturer at several universities in Germany and abroad. Since 2023 he works at the Competence Center for Societal Transformations (ccst) at Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences. He is co-editor of the journal Political Science Applied, co-author of the books Kultur in den internationalen Beziehungen (Springer VS, 2018) and Parteianhängerschaft in Deutschland (Springer VS, 2023), author of the book Hobbes and Rawls on European integration: A contractarian perspective (Palgrave MacMillan, 2025) and co-editor of the book Non-EU Europe (Springer Nature, 2026). In 2018, he won the teaching award of Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences.

• Rolf, J. N. (2026). Signalling and Balancing in the Conflict in Ukraine from 2014 to 2016: Ukrainian Actors, Russia and the European Union. Central European Journal of International and Security Studies., 1–33. https://doi.org/10.51870/ijbj9586.
• Rolf, J. N. (2025). Hobbes and Rawls on European Integration: A Contractarian Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-96859-4.
• Rolf, J. N. (2025). What’s Wrong With These Pictures? A Critique of Waltz, Walt and McFaul. Journal of Strategic Security, 18(3), 59–68. https://doi.org/10.5038/1944-0472.18.3.2514.
• Rolf, J. N. (2023). The First 100 Years: IR, Critical Security Studies and the Quest for Peace. International Politics, 20, 554–571. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-022-00393-w.
• Rolf, J. N. (2023). Olympism, cosmopolitanism, nationalism: the many face(t)s of the Olympics. Journal of Political Ideologies, 28(1), 102–120. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569317.2021.1916206.
• Rolf, J. N. (2022). ’Both/And or Neither/Nor? On the Prospect of “New Cosmopolitanism” to Serve as a Middle Ground between Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism. Global Studies Quarterly, 2(1), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1093/isagsq/ksac015.
• Rolf, J. N. (2022). Rückblick als Vorausblick? Eine Eventdatenanalyse des ersten Kriegsjahres in der Ukraine. Wissenschaft und Frieden, 3, 1.
• Rolf, J. N. (2021). Donald Trump’s Jacksonian and Jeffersonian foreign policy. Policy Studies, 42(5-6), 662–681. https://doi.org/10.1080/01442872.2021.1934431.
• Rolf, J. N., Janssen, N. J., & Liedtke, M. (2021). Projecting General Assembly Voting Records onto an Enlarged Security Council: An Analysis of the G4 Reform Proposal. Global Policy, 12(3), 313–324. https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12934.
• Rolf, J. N. (2020). Rawls’s duty of assistance and relative deprivation: Why less is more and more is even more. Journal of International Political Theory, 16(1), 25–46. https://doi.org/10.1177/1755088218798657.
• Rolf, J. N. (2017). Special Affects? Nationalist and Cosmopolitan Discourses Through the Transmission of Emotions: Empirical Evidence from London 2012. British Politics, 12, 409–431. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41293-016-0042-4.
• Rolf, J. N. (2016). The fool and the franchiser: formal justice in the political theories of Hobbes and Rawls. Ethics & Global Politics, 9(1), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.3402/egp.v9.30042.