On May 3, the principal investigator and supervisor of PRCP, Harald Müller, was awarded the Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany by president Frank-Walter Steinmeier.
From 1996 to 2015, Harald Müller served as a director of Peace Research Institute Frankfurt. On the occasion of the award, the current director of PRIF, Prof. Dietelhof said: "As director for many years, Harald Müller played a key role in establishing and shaping the Leibniz Institute Hessian Foundation for Peace and Conflict Research (HSFK). It was to his great credit that the HSFK was brought into the Leibniz Association in 2009 and thus established as a leading peace research institute in Germany. It was always his concern not to conduct peace research as art pour l'art, but to anchor it in society and address the central challenges for the peace policy. In particular, his research on nuclear disarmament and disarmament efforts and his commitment in this area has proven to be groundbreaking. I am very pleased that his commitment to peace is now being honored with the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.”
Harald Müller has been bringing his knowledge and experience from academia to the practice: He has been active in an advisory capacity in arms control policy since 1987 and was a member of the German delegation to review conferences of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty five times between 1995 and 2015. He advised the United Nations Secretary-General as the German representative on the Committee on Disarmament from 2009 to 2005, and from 2010 to 2014 served as Vice President of the EU Disarmament and Non-Proliferation Consortium, the advisory institution of the EU External Action Service, which he co-founded.
From 1999 until his retirement in 2016, Harald Müller taught as a professor of political science with a focus on international relations/peace and conflict studies at Goethe University Frankfurt (GUF). He was awarded its Medal of Honor in 2017. In 2013, he received the Wilhelm Leuschner Medal of the State of Hesse. In 2019, he was awarded the Thérèse Delpech Prize of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Since 2019, Harald has been a Senior Fellow and Supervisor at our Peace Research Center Prague at Charles University in Prague.
