About us

The profile initiative “Violence and Security Research” is an emerging key research area at the University of Hamburg to which over 34 professors in five faculties contribute their expertise. We span the fields of sociology, political science, communication studies, informatics, geography, history, law, cultural anthropology, theology, and education. Our research is concerned with how multiple crises and different emerging and established (e.g. environmental, nuclear) threats are envisaged, understood, and responded to. We ask how antidemocratic developments across the globe impact the relationship between democracy and security and how they intersect with longstanding injustices that have resulted from violent histories of colonization, capitalism and the nation-state, inextricably linking the West or Global North to the East or the Global South. We explore these intersections for their political, social, affective, embodied, and spatial underpinnings in the context of what has been termed the Anthropocene and investigate the implications of information technologies and AI for emerging configurations of planetary insecurity. From a historical perspective, special attention is paid to the temporalities of violence, i.e., time as a resource for action in wars, pogroms, occupations, and aggressions across epochs. In analyses of genocides in the 20th and 21st centuries, colonialism and its legacies, as well as national socialism and communism, we trace the transformations of violence in their respective ideologies, rhetorics, enabling structures, routines, self-authorizations, and norms.