Wednesday, October 18th, 2017 Ethnic Diversity and Questions of Security

Description

So far, security studies have given surprisingly little attention to ethnic diversity as a constituent factor in the overall dynamics of security management. Many basic contributions to the field still refer to ethnic difference mainly as a source of conflict and therefore as an object of securitization. As a consequence, cultural codes, linguistic barriers, and processes of self-identification and ethnic grouping as well as ethnic othering have not constituted an important aspect of analysis. Especially in multi-ethnic societies, however, ethnic affiliations play a crucial role in pre-structuring audiences and security agendas. The presentation thus addresses this emerging field for interdisciplinary security studies. It aims at identifying components coming from different disciplines that will help us to understand why and when ethnic difference becomes a security issue at the intersection of different societal categories and agencies. It will do that in reference to historical as well as current European examples, thus inviting to reflect on the development of a new research design.”

Since 2007, Peter Haslinger has been the Director of the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East-Central Europe in Marburg, Professor of East-Central European History at the Historical Institute of the Justus Liebig University and the Interdisciplinary Center for Eastern Europe in Gießen (GiZo). His research and teaching focuses security and violence studies; minority issues and questions of nationalism, regionalism and language policies; memory and history of discourse; the spatial turn and the history of cartography. His publications focus on the Habsburg monarchy and successor states in the 19th and 20th centuries.