The aim of this anthropological research project is to improve understanding of the peace-making processes operating in the ongoing Malagasy political crisis. A dispute in 2009 over the Malagasy presidency, the most powerful political position on the island, marked the beginning of a particularly difficult period. At first tensions were limited to the national political level, but the situation rapidly degenerated into a more general social crisis as international support was suspended, the economy plummeted down and the population of about 22 million had to cope with great insecurity. In this period of acute risk to social order a number of unusual conflict resolution strategies were adopted independently. Alongside the official, internationally brokered negotiations, there were a number of distinctive, local mechanisms which had a clear, positive impact on the situation. The innovative institutional embodiment of a local concept of solidarity rooted in traditional ancestor worship (fihavanana) and popular justice movements led by charismatic personalities were amongst the most important in paving the way for conflict resolution and a new beginning for Madagascar. The rarity of such successful conflict resolution in post-colonial contexts arouses curiosity and demands close evaluation. An attractive scientific challenge is triggered, offering a unique opportunity to devise an ethnography of de-escalation and peace which will stand in contrast to the conventional focus on war and disorder. Anthropological fieldwork in Antananarivo (the Madagascan capital) and the Western Melaky region as well as historical research will furnish qualitative evidence for an insightful interpretation of the unique dynamics of solidarity observed. The project will contribute to a better understanding of the recent Malagasy crisis but will also provide an important case study of theoretical and practical relevance to political anthropology and international peace-building initiatives.

Anthropogenic land use/land cover change (LULCC) is now one of the major causes of biodiversity loss and the second largest source of carbon emissions to the atmosphere. Policy-makers face a challenging task when making decisions that impact the future of the landscapes with great levels of uncertainty about its outcome. Spatially-explicit LULCC models can be important tools to help assessing the outcome of such decisions a piori. However, modelling anthropogenic processes is a great challenge. Not only is the physical environment itself highly variable, but the underlying processes that drive LULCC combine socio-economic, cultural, political and environmental factors. Although enormous advances have been made in the field of LULCC modelling over the past couple of decades, there is room for improvement as these models still lack the ability to project both the rate and location of future change accurately. Improving these models would dramatically increase their potential to help solving real-world problems. Therefore, this research proposal will improve an existing LCCM to be able to incorporate region- and land-use transition specific parameters, representing observed relationships between proximate causes and drivers of LULCC, which vary over time and space. By the means of two real-world case studies, on different biomes (Serengeti-Mara Ecosystem and the Brazilian Atlantic Forest), this project will show how a LULCC model can be used to tackle two important worldwide conservation issues: the conflict between infrastructure development and conservation (Serengeti) and the impacts of implementing financial incentives to promote forest restoration (Atlantic Forest). Ultimately, this research proposal will provide a framework for robust decision-making under uncertainty, particularly when considering potential trade-offs between socio-economic and ecological implications at different scales, and a tool for aiding management of stakeholders' conflicts due to LULCC.

Citizen science – research conducted in whole or in part by people for whom science is not their profession – is increasingly valuable for society, ecology, and conservation. Natural resource and landscape management based on the best available science is increasingly relying, at least in part, on citizen science data to make informed and adaptive decisions supporting biodiversity conservation . The data collection power of citizen science is enormous, but as citizen science at this scale is a new development in ecology and conservation, there is a great deal of inefficiency in this process. The largest inefficiency is that, to this point, the most ‘successful’ citizen science projects generally have a haphazard sampling regime replete with redundancies and gaps in the associated citizen science data. Can we direct this enormous amount of effort more efficiently? What steps can be taken at the upstream portion of citizen science projects to maximise efficiency of analyses with downstream datasets? This project will build a workflow which allows us to maximise the information content that citizen scientists contribute to our collective knowledge of biodiversity by developing algorithms that predict the highest ‘valued’ sites in time and space for biodiversity sampling by citizen scientists which leads to more efficiently directing effort in space and time.

I will carry out an individual fellowship to push forward disruptive advances in enhanced light-matter interactions at the nanoscale. I will explore ways of control light-emission from quantum dots (QDs) combining them with all-dielectric 2D metamaterials that support non-trivial topological properties. The fellowship will be carried out for 2 years in the host organization, the Advanced Science Research Center (ASRC) at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), under the supervision of Prof. Andrea Alù. In the third year, I will return to the beneficiary organization, Martin-Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) in Germany, and work under the supervision of Prof. Joerg Schilling. The research includes the development of theory, numerical design, sample fabrication and optical characterization. The combination of - my present experience with active emitters incorporated with nanostructures, - the ASRC-supervisor’s expertise in topological nanophotonics, - ASRC’s unique fabrication and characterization facilities, - the MLU-supervisor’s expertise in nonlinear nanophotonics provides a unique synergy to push forward in disruptive ways the field of nanophotonics and topological optics. I will use near-infrared (NIR) QDs integrated into Silicon as the material platform of interest. The research will contribute to fundamental discoveries in the field of light-matter interactions and topological photonics, and pave the way to compact all-dielectric light-sources for data-processing and telecommunication applications.

With a total of four universities from three partnercountries, the Martin Luther University implemented an exchange in the Erasmus+ 2017 project. Students, lecturers and staff mobility were implemented. Primarily, the Erasmus+ funding made it possible to continue existing partnerships, and in some cases contacts could also be refreshed. This was the case, for example, in the fields of economics: The project objective of the Economics Department was to reactivate contacts with the Economics Faculty of the Woronesh State University (Russia), which had been lost in the years following reunification. In the first stage, the exchange of students and lecturers was planned. In turn, other contacts to Russia could be intensively cultivated thanks to the exchange. The Department of Geography has been in contact with the Altai State University in Barnaul for 20 years. The aim of the mobilities was to intensively get to know the teaching contents in the field of environmental monitoring, environmental management, environmental planning and field research. To this end, the lecturers gave lectures within the framework of the master's programmes of the respective host institution and conducted field exercises. The teaching languages were German and English (in Halle) and German and Russian (in Barnaul).Since the 1979s there have also been close professional relationships between Halle's linguistics and the linguistics/ German studies in Woronesh. From 2006 to 2016, there was a German Studies Institute Partnership (GIP) here, and since 2017 a Vladimir Admoni doctoral programme - both financed by the DAAD. The Erasmus Plus programme made it possible to continue the activities in student and teacher exchange that had been initiated during the GIP, while at the same time providing an important complement to the Admoni programme. MLU's close cooperation with its Russian partners has the overarching aim of promoting the German language, which has always played an important role in the close economic and scientific relations between Germany and Russia, and thus opening up important potential for sustainable relations in the field of recruiting skilled workers and young academics. The project focused on the promotion of student and teacher mobility as well as the expansion of teaching and research cooperation.The Department of Slavic Studies also profited from the funding. The mobility between students and teachers of the Department of Serbian Literary Studies of the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Novi Sad and the Seminar for Slavic Studies of the Philosophical Faculty II of the University of Halle-Wittenberg was continued in the second round 2017-2019, expanded (inclusion of German studies) and deepened due to the implementation of a joint excursion project. For the first time, an exchange with funds from the KA107 also took place in the Department of German Studies. The University of Sarajevo in Bosnia & Herzegovina was involved in this exchange. The aim was to benefit from each other, especially in the area of DaF/DaZ. This goal was achieved through joint projects between students from UNSA and MLU during student mobility. The range of courses offered at UNSA and MLU was also expanded by the mobility of lecturers.