Anja Mihr (born 1969), PhD, is a German political scientist and human rights researcher. She works in the areas of Transitional Justice, Cyber Justice, Climate Justice, Governance and Human Rights Regimes. She is an internationally known academic who has taught in various universities in Germany, the United States, Italy, China and the Netherlands. Her main work focuses on human rights, governance and transitional justice, looking at the interlinkage between institutions, organizations and the way human rights realization can be leveraged.
Anja Mihr has also served in various international academic and NGO advisory committees on human rights. From 2002 to 2006 she was a member of the Executive Board of Amnesty International Germany.
Career
Anja Mihr is the founder and director of the Center on Governance through Human Rights at the Berlin Governance Platform. From 2018-2023, Mihr had been appointed DAAD Professor for Human Rights, Democratization, Transitology, International Relations, Transitional Justice, at the OSCE Academy in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Her recent works include studies on Glocal Governance. She is a political consultant and advisor on Transitional Justice, Cyber Justice, and Climate Justice, and has held various professorships in this field. She has been Professor for Public Policy at the Willy Brandt School of Public Policy at Erfurt University in Germany, and Associate Professor at the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights (SIM) at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. She has held numerous other positions at think tanks, such as Head of Rule of Law at The Hague Institute for Global Justice and at internationally known academic institutions such as Peking University (Beida) in Beijing, the European Inter-University Center for Human Rights and Democratization (EIUC) in Venice, Columbia University in New York or Humboldt University in Berlin. Mihr's interdisciplinary background has focused on combining concepts of social sciences and international human rights law in her research and publications.
She graduated from Free University in Berlin. Her doctoral thesis on the Impact of Amnesty International's human rights work in the GDR (East Germany) during the period of the Cold War until 1989 was published in 2001.
Mihr was appointed as member of the Scientific Committee of the EU Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) from 2018 -2023.
Theory of Political Regime Consolidation through Transitional Justice
In Mihr's 2017 (2019) book on 'Regime Consolidation and Transitional Justice', she develops a theory to explain the impact of Transitional Justice measures in the context of political regime consolidations. For example, vetting and lustration processes, trials, compensations and reparations, amnesties impact the way a political system changes and consolidates. The core essence of this theory is to explain, how after a radical rupture or war, the new political system and its actors are able and willing to implement measures that allow political institutions and actors to democratically progress and increase their quality of democracy, or not.
According to Mihr, a political system/regime develops backward toward autocracy if TJ measures are applied exclusively. But a democratic system can progress and consolidate when TJ measures are applied in an inclusive manner and effort, in the first 10 to 20 years of system transition and transformation.
Therefore, whether a political regime consolidates democratically or autocratically, depends on how political actors during this process are willing or capable to put blame on all sides when dealing with the past or not.
Furthermore, the case studies on Turkey, Germany, and Spain illustrate, how over one and two generations after regime change, Transitional Justice measures mutually reinforce themselves, both in a downward (autocratic) spiral, as the example Turkey and East Germany show, as well as an upward (democratic) spiral as illustrated by the cases of West-Germany and Spain, depending on how exclusive or inclusive they are applied by civil society, victim and victimizers, governments and other formal and informal sectors of society.
Analytical Framework of Glocal Governance
In her works in glocal governance (Glocal Governance in the Anthropocene, 2022), Mihr develops an analytical framework to assess how local actors and institutions implement global and international norms in order to govern effectively, without the interference of state authorities or governments.