Main research areas
Heike Wieters' research focuses on the contemporary history of European integration, historically based international governance research, global welfare (state) history - in particular pension provision in Europe - and the history of transnational relationships and interactions between state and private actors in business and society.
Heike Wieters wrote her doctoral thesis on the history of international organisations - in particular on the corporate development and internationalisation of the developmental non-governmental organisation CARE. Following on from this project, she continues to research the history of international relations, the dynamics of global food markets, questions of development policy and food security as well as the history of international humanitarian ideas and actors.
In the field of welfare (state) research, Heike Wieters focuses in particular on the role of companies and associations in Europeanisation and globalisation processes.
In her current book project entitled ‘Private Actors in the Welfare State. Deutsche Lebensversicherungsunternehmen und die Entstehung europäischer Wohlfahrtsmärkte in der Alterssicherung seit 1945’, Heike Wieters takes a look at the German welfare state in its transnational and European context. The project examines the influence of private life insurance companies, transnational lobby organisations and international networks of experts on the transformation of concepts and practices of old-age provision in the Federal Republic of Germany since 1945. The project focuses on the work of private actors in order to trace longer lines of development of state-industrial cooperation (and competition) in the welfare sector and to complement recent research on ‘coordinated capitalism’ in Central European welfare economies. On the basis of archival research in company archives, archives of international organisations, European institutions and transnational lobby groups, the book examines how private insurers and professional insurance associations positioned themselves as socio-political actors, institutional investors and key economic players in the German welfare state and how they transformed their companies in order to operate successfully on the European insurance markets.