Damian Raess

Dr. Raess joined the WTI, University of Bern, as SNSF Professor in 2017. He is a political scientist specializing in International Political Economy.

He obtained a BA in Political Science (University of Lausanne), a MA in International Relations and a PhD in Social Sciences (both from the University of Amsterdam).

His main research interests lie in the nexus between globalization and labor. He is pursuing three lines of enquiry.

First, he studies the impact of outward investment linkages by Southern multinational companies on labor standards in advanced economies (Europe) and, in joint work with WTI postdoc Dr. Patrick Wagner, in emerging market (Brazil) and developing countries. This project, titled “BRICS Globalization and Labor Protections”, is generously funded by a SNSF grant to Dr. Raess.

Second, he studies the private regulation of labor standards in global supply chains. Raess co-leads, with Prof. Matthew Amengual (University of Oxford), the SNSF-funded project “Labor Standards Compliance and Buyer-Supplier Linkages in Global Supply Chains”, which analyzes the effects of private regulation on social compliance and trade relationships. WTI team member is postdoc Dr. Joseph Bommarito.

Finally, he studies the causes and consequences of labor clauses in trade agreements. He is the co-author (with Dora Sari) of the most comprehensive dataset on labor provisions in preferential trade agreements. By providing the coding of labor provisions at the most disaggregated level, the LABPTA dataset bears the promise of greater knowledge integration and accumulation within and across different methodological approaches in this field of research through a common framework.

In 2021-2023, Raess is a lecturer in the Bachelor in International Relations (BARI) program at the University of Geneva. He was a lecturer at the University of Reading (UK) and at the University of Geneva, and a visiting scholar at MIT and at Harvard University. He held visiting lectureships at KU Leuven, the University of Amsterdam, and the Graduate Institute in Geneva. He has published articles in journals such as International Studies Quarterly, Review of International Organizations, Review of International Political Economy, British Journal of Industrial Relations, and Socio-Economic Review.