What effect do global developments such as technologization and climate change have on political violence? How can political violence be limited or legitimized by international institutions? How is it interpreted and justified? Since April 2022, these questions have been addressed by the interdisciplinary joint project "Regional Research Center - Transformations of Political Violence (TraCe)," in which five Hessian research institutes are working together. The Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF), the Goethe University Frankfurt (GU), the Justus Liebig University Giessen (JLU), the Philipps University Marburg (UMR) and the Technical University of Darmstadt (TUDa) are involved in the center. The joint project is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) with approximately 5.2 million euros.
With the establishment of the Regional Research Center, the participating partner institutions intensify their existing cooperation and bundle their research in the field of violence research. A regional center of excellence for research, teaching and knowledge transfer is being created that is internationally visible and whose findings systematically contribute to the containment and prevention of political violence. The research center is interdisciplinary: it brings together different perspectives from political science, sociology, history and law, social anthropology, social psychology, cultural and linguistic studies, and computer science, as well as various methodological approaches.
"We are very pleased to begin work on the TraCe collaborative project, which will advance interdisciplinary collaboration and international networking among the participating institutions. The current developments in Ukraine tragically highlight the need to establish a Regional Research Center of this kind to study the causes, dynamics and effects of political violence," says Prof. Dr Christopher Daase, Deputy Executive Board Member of PRIF and spokesperson of TraCe.
The aim of the joint project is to identify the consequences of current transformations of violence for peace within society as well as internationally and to develop strategies for containing political violence under changing conditions. The research project will systematically analyze types and levels of political violence in three thematic research fields. The first research field deals with the changing forms of political violence and the influence of global trends such as technologization and climate change on dynamics of violence. The second research field examines how international institutions contain but also legitimize political violence and how new forms of violence can be captured institutionally. The third research field addresses the complex relationships between changing patterns of interpretation and justification of political violence and different memory spaces such as cities. In an overarching fourth research field, interactions between the changing forms, institutional hegemony, and interpretations of political violence are examined.
In order to make the research of the joint project visible to the public, the dialogical exchange with social actors is sought: transfer events such as workshops, panel discussions and lecture series, but also various publication formats contribute to making the research findings useful for political education, civil society engagement and science journalism.
The joint project is the result of a nationwide call for proposals by the BMBF for the funding and further development of research networks in the field of peace and conflict research. The idea for this joint project arose in the context of the close cooperation between PRIF and Goethe University (through the research center Normative Orders and the cluster initiative ConTrust) as well as in the close exchange between the partner institutions involved.