Prof. Aurel Croissant is a distinguished political science professor at Heidelberg University in Germany. He received his M.A. in Political Science from Johannes Gutenberg Universität, Mainz, in 1996. He started his career as an adjunct researcher and lecturer at the Universities of Mainz and Heidelberg. In 2001, he received a doctoral degree (Dr. Phil) in Political Science from Mainz University and was promoted to a non-tenured position as ‘Wissenschaftlicher Assistent’ (C1) at the Ruprecht-Karls-University, Heidelberg. In 2004, he accepted a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor for Comparative Politics at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. Since 2006, he has been Professor of Political Science (W3) at Heidelberg University. In 2023, he was appointed Frontier 10-10 Professor at Ewha Womans University, Seoul. He is also a Visiting Professor at National Taiwan University.
His main research interests include comparative democratization and democracy research; authoritarnism and autocratization; civil–military relations; militarization studies; party politics; civil society; conflict research; and the comparative politics of East and Southeast Asia. His research is documented in more than 300 scholarly publications in German, English, Indonesian, Russian, and Spanish, including several monographs and edited volumes and articles in journals such as Party Politics, Democratization, Journal of Democracy, Electoral Studies, Armed Forces & Society, Pacific Review, Japanese Journal of Political Science, Journal of East Asian Studies, Contemporary Southeast Asia, Political Studies, Contemporary Politics, Terrorism and Political Violence, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Asian Survey, Journal of Global Security Studies. His recent book publications include Dictators’ Endgames (Oxford: Oxford University Press with Tanja Eschenauer-Engler and David Kuehn, 2024), Research Handbook of Civil-Military Relations (Cheltenham and Northhampton: Edward Elgar, edited with David Kuehn and David Pion-Berlin, 2024), and The Routledge Handbook of Autocratization (London and New York: Routledge, edited with Luca Tomini, 2024).
He is editor-in-chief of the journal Democratization. He is on the editorial board of the Asian Journal of Political Science and the Journal of Contemporary Southeast Asian Affairs and a referee for numerous German and international journals, publishers, and academic funding institutions. He is member of the academic advisory boards of the German Institute for Global Affairs (GIGA), the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP), the Zentrum für Militärgeschichte und Sozialwissenschaften der Bundeswehr (ZMSBw), the Sustainable Governance Indicators (SGI), and the Bertelsmann Transformation-Index (BTI).