Bernd Bucher received his Ph.D. from the University of St. Gallen in 2011 and held the position of a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Bielefeld (faculty of sociology) prior to joining Franklin in 2015. His primary research interests are located at the intersection of IR theory and sociology, with a main focus on power, language and contestation practices as well as security dynamics. He has success fully published in leading academic journals and is currently part of a number of individual and collaborative research projects which focus on applying processual-relational thinking to IR.