The Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF) succeeded in this year’s contest of ideas of the Leibniz Association. The Association granted funding for an ethnological research group to be established at PRIF and a joint project in the field of peace research coordinated by the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB), the Hamburg based German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA) and PRIF.
For the first time, PRIF receives funding from the German that aims at enhancing excellence and cooperation in science, promoting female and young researchers and supports promising new research approaches.
The ethnological research group “Political Globalization and its Cultural Dynamics” will be established and headed by Dr Sabine Mannitz at PRIF starting from 2012. It will study global initiatives in the field of security sector reform and its success in different parts of the world. What effects do the mainly Western approaches to contain violence by reforming state security bodies have in other cultural contexts?
Professor Harald Müller, Executive Director at PRIF explains: “We are the first peace research institute to integrate ethnology into its research structure. Both the discipline’s stock of findings and applied methods are of outstanding importance in a time of internal violent conflicts. Furthermore, the Leibniz Association acknowledges and supports PRIF’s aim to promote experienced and highly qualified women, such as Sabine Mannitz, for leading academic positions.” Viewed from a governance perspective, peculiarities of local political, social or legal organization raise questions regarding the necessary minimum of shared common features to regard partners as legitimate. Ethnologically, the focus is set rather on which actors and cultural driving forces push forward social transformation processes. “It’s a great chance for us to systematically implement cultural anthropological approaches into peace and conflict research,” stresses Sabine Mannitz. “Sustainable conflict solutions demand that everyone involved – whether on a social or cross-national level – can expect a perspective of stability, the details of which underlie cultural conditions. These need to be more strongly incorporated when practical strategies of conflict solution and prevention are being developed.”
Harald Müller: “The second funded project, the research network ‘Contested World Orders’, increases the international visibility of ‘peace’ as a thematic priority within the Leibniz Association and enhances our interdisciplinary networking.”
The joint research project of PRIF, the WZB and GIGA studies new developments in the world order and the formation of new forms of political authority in spheres beyond the state, that are caused by the potentially conflict-prone rise of new powers like India or China on the one hand and civil society actors on the other. So far, analyses on the topic have lacked a systematic quantitative collection of the results. Thus, the joint project will not only investigate the current transitional phase but also process the findings in a database. “This information will be made available for both decision makers and international researchers”, says Professor Klaus Dieter Wolf, Deputy Director at PRIF. The project’s main research themes will focus on the “Rise of new powers”, “Politicization” and “Opposition, dissidence and justice“.
Both projects will be initially funded for 36 months with 901,800 Euro for the ethnological research group and 996,000 Euro for the "Contested World Orders" project.