Leonard Schliesser

Leonard Schliesser is a Senior Researcher with the Risk and Resilience team at the Center for Security Studies (CSS) at ETH Zurich. His research focuses primarily on critical infrastructure security, civil defence, and low-probability, high-impact events, such as blackouts.

Leonard holds an MSc in Risk (interdisciplinary Geography) from Durham University, UK and is also finalising a PhD in Human Geography there. In his PhD thesis, he investigated everyday power grid security in Germany. Through an STS approach, he positions and brings together standards and standardisation, forecasts, and training as distinct security techniques of the power grid. Besides his PhD, Leonard regularly contributes to German ‘civil security’ research, co-leads a graduate civil security research network of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), is an active civil defence expert volunteer with the German Federal Agency of Technical Relief (THW), and a reservist.

Working interdisciplinary, he has recently been interested in engaging with/thinking about governmental institutions as (neglected) critical infrastructures and what the German ‘Zeitenwende’ means for civil contingency/traditional civil defence organisations and planning. At heart and behind these topics lies an interest and engagement with the meaning of security and the ‘amount’ of security deemed (in-)sufficient.