S.H. (Stephen) Milder, PhD

• Making Green Germany:  Climate Politics After the Cold War, 1986-2011
  

My new research project studies how efforts to mitigate anthropogenic climate change gained political currency in post-Cold War Europe—and especially the recently reunified Federal Republic of Germany (FRG)—during the 1990s and 2000s.  The project departs from existing scholarship, which describes climate change as a unique problem and thus rarely considers its relationship to mainstream politics, by considering the myriad ways in which climate politics were entangled in German reunification and Europe’s post-Cold War transformation.

• Social Movements after 1968

Together with two colleagues, I am also working on a project focused on the history of social movements after 1968.  Specifically, we are interested in how and why social movements in the period after the 1968--the so-called "New Social Movements"--were considered so different from their predecessors by social scientists.  We seek to understand what the perceived differences between "new" and "old" social movements tell us about our changing understandings of popular politics and the possibilities for social change in Western Europe in the second half of the twentieth century

• Greening Democracy:  The Antinuclear Movement and Political Environmentalism in West Germany and Beyond, 1968 - 1983 (Cambridge University Press, 2017)

I recently completed a study of the antinuclear movement in Western Europe and its effects on democracy in the 1970s and early 1980s.  By tracing the movement’s rise from the grassroots up, my research shows how protests against nuclear reactors became sites for the development of public participation and community building in France, West Germany, and Switzerland.  By teasing out the connections between these local protests and the formation of national Green Parties, this project also reveals the extent to which environmental concerns changed many citizens’ approach to politics and motivated the reform and renewal of parliamentary democracy across Western Europe.