Christin Tonne is a postdoctoral fellow on the SNF-funded project “Defending Democracy in the European Union: A Socio-Legal Approach to the European Institutions”, starting in August 2023. The project analyses how democratic institutions have defended themselves against threats from political parties that aim to undermine their very existence. More specifically, it studies how the EU institutions have approached threats to its proper functioning coming from such political parties after the latter entered the Council of the EU or after their representatives were directly elected to the European Parliament.
Christin completed her PhD in Anthropology and Sociology in 2022 at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. Using an ethnographic approach she investigated how the European Parliament has protected itself against far-right actors at the EU level. She traced the nature of confrontation between EU institutional actors and the far right in the European Parliament since the first direct elections in 1979. Before starting the PhD she was herself employed as a parliamentary assistant in the European Parliament in Brussels. Next to her doctoral research, she worked as a Teaching Assistant from 2016-2019 in the ANSO and MINT departments at the Graduate Institute. She is currently a Research Associate at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy.