Glocal Junctions
Research department V uses practice-theoretical approaches to study conflict and peace processes in glocal situations. Research focuses on the complex entanglements in which intertwined local, regional, and global life-worlds and action constellations recreate each other. Locality, like the global, is always relational. It can thus only be understood in the context of junctures with—and partly the disjunctures of—knowledge stocks, discourses, actors, or fields of action. The research department examines the political rationalities that arise in glocal situations and theaters of action: Do fragmented and yet glocally interwoven spheres of action influence political strife or violent conflicts? How? What impact do normative concepts such as legitimacy, modernity, or appropriate crisis interventions have on real disputes in specific settings? How is globality/ locality produced or prevented through concrete everyday actions? The department’s focus on “large issues, explored in small places” calls for an inductive methodological approach to reconstruct social experiences and everyday cultural rationality in observable theaters of action. According to this orientation, research in department V is primarily ethnographic.
In line with PRIF’s research program Coercion and Peace (2018), department V first asks how actors generate, respond to, and transform coercion in glocal practice, and then how, as a global-local mechanism, coercion shapes political conflicts, especially the possibility of transforming conflict peacefully. Coercion is not to be understood as just a regulatory means used by actors: Coercion requires social legitimacy and is therefore always embedded in normative orders; subjects and societies are hence not just audiences but are also actors who validate the use of coercion and (re-)produce its social and political regulation. This dialectic prompts us to view social arenas as places where coercive practices are constituted, safeguarded, and legitimized.
Current PhD Project
- A new Diaspora? Reconfigurations of political positioning of Turkish institutions and Turkish people in Germany
- Diverging perspectives: Legitimizing regional interventions and local perceptions
- Spatial order of a divided society: Production and appropriation of conflict spaces in Mozambique (cancelled)
Completed PhD Project
- Coercion in Peacebuilding
- Corona Monitor
- Everyday Political Subjectification and the Rise of Regressive Politics. Downward mobility, urbanization and the production of space in Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig
- Evils of a Global Past? Tensions between local practices and global politics in genocide commemoration
- Local perceptions of regional interventions: AU and ECOWAS in Burkina Faso and The Gambia
- Nation Building and the Perpetration of Genocide: Memory, National Security, and the Cold War
- Remembering Political Founding Fathers: ‘Historical Authenticity’ in Politics and Memory Culture in Post-colonial Mozambique (cancelled)
- The Weaponization of the Environment in Times of Climate Change (Working Title)
- Populist Discourse and Claims to Authenticity in Brazil, India and Ukraine
- Contested crises in Athens and Frankfurt am Main. Productions of space between hegemony and moments.
- Cultural Effects of Global Norm Transmission for SSR
- Ethnic Differences in Education and Diverging Prospects of Urban Youth in an Enlarged Europe / EDUMIGROM
- Common Remembrance, Future Relations
- Conflicts of recognition in the immigration society
- The Image of the Democratic Soldier: Tensions Between the Organisation of Armed Forces and the Principles of Democracy in European Comparison
- European Migration Policy in Crisis
- The Cultural Dynamics of Political Globalisation
- Remembering Political Founding Fathers: ‘Historical Authenticity’ in Politics and Memory Culture in Post-colonial Mozambique (cancelled)
- Baum, Max
- Kießling, Jonas
- Klamer, Jie-Yoon
- Reinhardt, Darius