Wolfgang Seibel was a Full Professor of Politics and Public Administration in Konstanz (1990-2022) and continues to teach as a Senior Fellow at the Hertie School in Berlin. He studied political science and administrative science at Marburg University and at the German Graduate School of Administrative Science in Speyer. Seibel obtained his PhD at the University of Kassel (1982) where he also completed his Habilitation in Political Science (1988). He held Guest Professorships at the Institut für Höhere Studien / Institute for Advanced Studies (1992) in Vienna, the University of California at Berkeley (1994), Stanford University (2014), the Central European University (2016), the University of Pretoria (2017) and the University of Utrecht (2019/20). He was twice a Temporary Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (School of Social Science 1989/90, School of Historical Studies 2003) and a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2004/2005) and of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS, 2019). Since 2009, he is a member of the Heidelberg Academy of Science.
Wolfgang Seibel's recent work focuses on the theory of public administration, including variants of drastic administrative failure and disasters, and on international bureacracies in various forms ranging from occupation regimes during World War II and its impact on the Holocaust to humanitarian intervention and complex UN peacekeeping missions and phenomena of rare but drastic failure in public administration. His books include "The Nonprofit Sector in Germany," Manchester UP 2001 (with Helmut K. Anheier); "Verwaltete Illusionen. Die Privatisierung der DDR-Wirtschaft durch die Treuhandanstalt und ihre Nachfolger“ [Managerial Illusions. The Privatization of the GDR Economy through the Treuhandanstalt and it’s Successors], Campus Publ. 2005; "Networks of Nazi Persecution. Bureaucracy, Business and the Organization of the Holocaust,” Berghahn 2005 (ed., with Gerald D. Feldman); "Der prekäre Staat. Herrschaft und Verwaltung im Nationalsozialismus“ [The Precarious State. Power and Administration in Nazi Germany], Campus Publ. 2011 (ed., with Sven Reichardt); “Persecution and Rescue. The Politics of the 'Final Solution' in France, 1940-1944", The University of Michigan Press 2016; "The Management of UN Peacekeeping. Coordination, Learning & Leadership in Peace Operations”, Lynne Rienner Publ. 2017 (ed., with Julian Junk, Francesco Mancini, Till Blume); “Verwaltungsdesaster” [Public Administration Disasters], Campus Publ. 2017 (with Kevin Klamann and Hannah Treis); "Verwaltung verstehen. Eine theoriegeschichtliche Einführung" [Understanding Public Administration. A History of Ideas-based Introduction], 3rd ed., Suhrkamp 2018; "Collapsing Structures and Public Mismanagement", Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2022.