University of North Carolina Center for Global Initiatives

Niklaus Steiner

Director

Niklaus Steiner is the Director of the Center for Global Initiatives at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. A native of Switzerland who moved to the U.S. in his youth, Steiner has had the good fortune of moving between cultures all his life, and this experience shapes his academic focus.

Steiner earned a B.A. with Highest Honors in International Studies at the University of North Carolina and a Ph.D. in Political Science at Northwestern University.

His research and teaching interests are immigration, refugees, nationalism, and citizenship, and his publications include Arguing About Asylum: The Complexity of Refugee Debates in Europe (St. Martin's, 2000); The Problems of Protection: UNHCR, Refugees, and Human Rights eds. Niklaus Steiner, Mark Gibney and Gil Loescher (Routledge 2003); Regionalism in the Age of Globalism, eds. Lothar Hoennighausen, Marc Frey, James Peacock, and Niklaus Steiner (Wisconsin, 2005); and The Age of Apology: The West Confronts its Past eds. Mark Gibney, Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann, Jean-Marc Coicaud and Niklaus Steiner (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

His textbook International Migration and Citizenship Today (Routledge, 2009) aims to facilitate classroom discussions on admission and membership in democracies.

With Australian colleagues, he has just completed the edited book Migration Security: Citizenship and Social Inclusion in a Transnational Era. (Routledge 2012).