Dr. Irene Weipert-Fenner

Irene Weipert-Fenner is a senior research fellow and member of the executive board at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF). She works on authoritarian regimes, democratization, social movements and contentious politics with a focus on socioeconomic and socioecological conflicts. Among other topics, Irene Weipert-Fenner has studied intensively labor movements and mobilization of unemployed people with a regional focus on North Africa.

Irene Weipert-Fenner currently co-directs a research project funded by the Hans-Böckler-Foundation that studies national and transnational alliances and lines of conflict in the context of green hydrogen economies. The project analyzes how political and social actors in Germany, as an importing country, and in four key exporting countries—Namibia, Tunisia, Chile, and Colombia—are positioning themselves with regard to green hydrogen.

Irene Weipert-Fenner holds a PhD in political science from Goethe University Frankfurt. She is a member of the steering committee of the research network “Mediterranean Politics and Society” of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR). She was a Visiting Professor for Middle Eastern Politics at the University of Marburg in 2019 and an active member of the Arab German Young Academy between 2019-2024.

Among numerous publications, she is the author of The Autocratic Parliament: Power and Legitimacy in Egypt, 1866-2011 (2020 Syracuse University Press), editor of the themed section “Socioeconomic reforms in times of political transformation: Conflicts over the political economy in Egypt and Tunisia post-2011“ (Mediterranean Politics 2025, 30(1)) and co-editor of Socioeconomic Protests in MENA and Latin America: Egypt and Tunisia in Interregional Comparison (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, with Jonas Wolff), and of Clientelism and Patronage in the Middle East and North Africa: Networks of Dependency (Routledge, 2018, together with Laura Ruiz de Elvira and Christoph Schwarz).

Photo: ©Uwe Dettmar