Dr Johannes Socher is currently a Walter Benjamin Fellow (DFG) at the Institute for International and Comparative Law in Africa at the Faculty of Law, University of Pretoria. Previously, he worked as a rule of law adviser at the German Federal Foreign Office and supported the governments of different African countries as a consultant and project officer of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). He is a member of the German government’s expert roster for election observation missions of the European Union and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.
Johannes is the author of “Russia and the Right to Self-Determination in the Post-Soviet Space” (Oxford University Press, 2021). His most recent publications with a regional focus on Africa include “Symbolic Popular Participation in Constitution-Making and Constitutionalism in Francophone Africa” in the African Journal of International and Comparative Law (2024, with Charles Fombad) and “Assistance to Constitutional Courts in Fragile Contexts: The Case of Mali, 2017–2022” in the World Comparative Law journal (2023). While his work currently focuses on comparative constitutional law in Africa, he also does research in the fields of public international law, transitional justice, criminal justice, and European and German public law.
Johannes joined the African Network of Constitutional Lawyers as an associate member in 2021 and was elected into its executive committee at the biannual meeting in Dakar in 2024.