Anders Berg-Sørensen

Kort præsentation

Anders Berg-Sørensen is Associate Professor in Political Theory. He is interested in questions of democratic hope and despair.

He has over the last decade done research on the contestation of the religion-politics relationship in European public discourse and political thinking historically and actually. The focus has been on the political doctrine of secularism regulating the religion-politics relationship, the formation of secularism in early modern political thought and the transformation of secularism in contemporary political theory. He is claiming a shift from a critique of secularism to a critical secularism.

Furthermore, he is carrying out research on political ethics and real politics engaging democratic theory and political theory of realism. He is currently working on a book manuscript with the preliminary title, Light and darkness in European post-war government: Democratic compromises of legitimacy, accountability and transparency. The project brings together the literature on compromises in democratic theory and the political history of democratic institutions constituted in post-war Europe with the aim at controlling the governments’ exercise of power. The focal point is the political negotiations of democratic principles of accountability and transparency in government in relation to x) the various constitutional revisions in the immediate wake of the second world war influenced by the then contemporary human rights discourse and y) the establishment of then new political institutions of democratic control with public authorities and the gradual changes of these institutions. The crucial questions are if, how, and to what degree compromises are made in these political negotiations, and whether this has had implications for the democratic legitimacy of governments and the political institutions of democratic control.

CV

Education: 
PhD, Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, October 2004 
MSc, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, September 1996
BSc, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, July 1993

Previous positions:
Assistant Professor in Political Theory, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, February 2008-January 2009
Assistant Professor in Religion in the 21st Century, Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, March 2005-January 2008
Post. Doc. in Democratic Governance, Department of Social Sciences, Roskilde University, September 2003-February 2005 (Paternal leave September 2004-January 2005)
Research Assistant, Department of Social Sciences, Roskilde University and Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, March 2003-August 2003
Head of Section, Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, April 2002-February 2003
Research Fellow, Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, October 1999-March 2002 (Visiting Fellow, Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University, Spring 2001 and Visiting Scholar, Department of Philosophy, Johan Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt a.M., Winter 2001-2002)
Head of Section, Ministry of Education, May 1997-September 1999
Part-Time Lecturer, Department of Social Sciences, Roskilde University, September 1996-June 1999
Part-Time Lecturer, Department of Jurisprudence, Aarhus University, January 1997-April 1997

Current position:
Associate Professor in Political Theory, Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, February 2009-