From 1997 until his retirement in July 2024 [1], he was Director at the Center for European Integration Studies (ZEI) and Professor at the Institute for Political Science and Sociology at the University of Bonn.

Kühnhardt carried out extensive journalistic reporting trips through Asia and Africa and made TV documentaries in South Korea, Bangladesh and India.

[2] Kühnhardt completed his studies in history, philosophy and political science in 1983 with a doctorate under the supervision of Karl Dietrich Bracher[3] at the University of Bonn.

[4] In preparation for his doctorate, research studies took him to the archives of the League of Nations and the UNHCR in Geneva as well as to refugee camps around the world.

Studie zur ideengeschichtlichen Bestimmung eines politischen Schlüsselbegriffs (The Universality of Human Rights) is considered a standard work.

In 1991, Kühnhardt was appointed by the Baden-Württemberg Science Minister to the Chair of Scientific Politics (succeeding Arnold Bergstraesser and Wilhelm Hennis) at the University of Freiburg.

Together with Jürgen von Hagen (economist) and Christian Koenig (legal scholar), Kühnhardt built up and led ZEI over more than 25 years as an internationally renowned research, outreach and further education institution.

[10] Kühnhardt has repeatedly worked as an advisor to political and church actors, for example for the Secretary General of the Council of Europe, the President of the European Parliament, the Parliament of the West African regional organization ECOWAS, the Secretary General of the ACP Group (now: Organization of African, Caribbean and Pacific States OACPS) and the German Catholic Bishops' Conference.

For many years he worked pro bono on the governing board of the European Humanities University (EHU) in Vilnius, on the Steering Committee of the Koenigswinter Conference and the Young Leader Conferences of the Atlantik-Brücke (Atlantic Bridge), in the development of West Africa Institute in Praia and in the advisory group for EU studies at the Asia-Europe Foundation in Singapore.

As scholar and journalist, Kühnhardt deals in his research and teaching with the history of political ideas and a normatively based democratic theory, with development problems, especially focussing on cultural and religious aspects, issues of international order as well as with fundamental questions of the European Union and comparative global regional integration.

His aim is to place events and processes in contemporary history in a larger context in order to make them better understandable and to deepen their respective historical and philosophical significance.So far (as of 2024) Kühnhardt has published 44 monographs and individual publications as well as 28 books as co-author or co-editor in various languages.

His work received international attention and was still cited decades later when the global refugee issue finally gained political interest.

Despite severe restrictions on their universality in Chinese, Japanese, Islamic, Indian, African and communist political thought, Kühnhardt attested to the gradual universalizability of human rights based on the standards formulated by the United Nations.

[29] As recently as 2004, British historian Timothy Garton Ash re-confirmed the conclusion from Kühnhardt's study that there was “very little evidence in other cultures” for the idea of human rights.

[32][33] Revolutionszeiten (Revolutionary times) Following his 1992 analysis of the founding of the European Union with the Treaty of Maastricht (signed on February 7, 1992, in force on November 1, 1993) in the light of the idea of federalism,[34] Kühnhardt categorized and contextualized the upheavals of the years 1989/1991 historically, spanning a perspective from revolutions in ancient Rome to the bloody revolutions in Russia and China in the 20th century.

As recently as 2017, excerpts of Kühnhardt's book were quoted in an exhibition by the Federal Foundation for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Germany (Bundesstiftung Aufarbeitung ) and the German Historical Museum in Berlin.

In his 1996 study, he analysed several “experiments” in European history to create order for the troubled continent: Hegemony and raison d’état (1618-1648); balance of power and legitimacy (1713-1815); hope for collective security (1815-1939).

Only NATO and the EU, Kühnhardt argued, were politically solid enough and rooted in law to guarantee stability for their respective member states.

[43] Based on intensive studies of the original sources and with an extensive discussion of the current state of research, Kühnhardt interpreted the following “Future Thinkers”: Hannah Arendt, Alexis de Tocqueville, Thomas Hobbes, Niccolò Machiavelli, Aurelius Augustinus and Aristotle.

In his work biography, he explained that he had conceived his most important studies at American universities and think tanks: “Nowhere is the research infrastructure better, the atmosphere more inspiring, the world of horizons more beguiling for the expansion of one's own mind”.

In 2002, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of this unique transatlantic network organization, he reconstructed the history of the Atlantik Brücke mirroring German-American relations between 1952 and 2002.

US President George Bush (1989-1993) wrote in his foreword - which is rare for a scientific publication - that Kühnhardt not only portrayed the Atlantik Brücke itself “with admirable skill and remarkable success,” but also showed how the ideas guiding it shaped five decades of German-American relations beyond the peaceful unification of Germany in a unifying Europe.

[50] In the context of his study on the historic evolution and changing rationale of the EU, Kühnhardt edited the results of a research project which he conducted at St. Antony's College Oxford under the title Crises in European Integration.

[51] Simon Serfaty judged in the “Journal of Cold War Studies” that the texts by German scholars collected in the volume were “a compelling reason for hope in the future” of the EU.

According to Kühnhardt, the lack of sustainable concepts of regional integration in Northeast Asia and in the Middle East demonstrates the persistence of unresolved geopolitical constellations.

With reference to Popper's thesis that tribalism destroys humanism, Kühnhardt criticizes political Islam and Western anti-globalization movements as main opponents to a modern inclusive global society.

[62] The edited texts about encounters with a myriad of ordinary people and public figures, places of interest and impressions on local realities reconstruct the complex developments of today's global world in its dialectical interconnectedness and disunity during the time span between 1960 and 2020.

Reviewers judged that the volume had “marked a safe point in a mined area” [66] and considered the book and its underlying project as “overall successful”.

Reviewers praised the encyclopedia as expression of the intellectual profile of one of the leading research universities[69] and described the conceptual work done in the two volums as "gigantic".

[70] Im Gespräch bleiben (Staying in conversation) For over three decades, Ludger Kühnhardt brought together current and former doctoral students for seminar meetings (Freiburger Politikdialog/Bonner Europakolloquium) mostly with contributions by the young scholars themselves.