SFB 923:  Threatened Orders

• Subject Area: Humanities ; Social and Behavioural Sciences
• Term: from 2011 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 170320015

The CRC 923 focuses its research on ‘Threatened Social Orders’. In line with the wider meaning of the German word Ordnungen, order is conceptualized as an arrangement of elements that are related to each other in a certain way and that structure social groups or even whole societies. Orders are created, confirmed, and/or are modified by both, the actions and ideas of human actors. They emerge and exist for certain periods of time, contain and enable the drawing of boundaries between different social groups, channel options for action, stabilize behavioural expectations, and establish routines. At the same time, they serve as elements of broader overlapping and interdependent figurations of order: orders always exist in relation to other orders, to which they may be superordinate, subordinate, or adjacent. They emerge from the dynamic tension between normative propositions (which are often emotionally charged and associated with identity and identification) and practical realization. Such characteristics become especially recognizable in situations where orders are under threat.We consider orders as threatened when actors become convinced that their possible courses of action are precarious, when normal behaviours and routines are called into question, when they feel they can no longer rely on each other either now or in the near future, and when they succeed in establishing a discourse about the perceived threat. Within this framework, researchers from a variety of disciplines in the Humanities, the Social Sciences, Legal Studies, and Theology collaborate on a model of Threatened Orders to achieve four long-term research goals: 1. to historicize current diagnoses of crisis,2. to investigate modes of rapid social change,3. to update categories of space and time in the social and cultural sciences, and4. to fundamentally reflect on the social and cultural sciences under the conditions of globalization.These broad goals are achievable because the concept of ‘order’ is central to political and social thought across multiple scholarly disciplines and historical epochs. Adding the attribute ‘threatened’ to the concept of order sharpens its profile, making it applicable to current interdisciplinary debates on issues such as crisis, revolution, social change and modernisation, security/insecurity, resilience and emotion, as well as to debates surrounding the historical dimension of globalisation. The CRC thus addresses issues that are currently widely debated both nationally and internationally. The Centre’s primary approach is to seek out and identify the basic patterns of social order at the – short – moment of threat. By connecting threat and order in this way, both the existential aspects of threat as well as the stability and variance of order can be analysed from a diachronic perspective. The model of Threatened Orders thus opens a path to addressing fundamental questions in the cultural and social sciences in the 21st century.

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres
• International Connection: United Kingdom

Completed projects

• A02 - From festivity to riot: Shrovetide plays as a threat to civic order during the late Middle Ages and the Reformation (Project Head Ridder, Klaus )
• A03 - Riots in mining regions. Germany and the United Kingdom during the 20th century (Project Heads Doering-Manteuffel, Anselm ;  Neuheiser, Jörg )
• B01 - Earthquakes as a threat to socials orders. Communication of threat with literature and as literature (5th c. BC - 6th c. AD) (Project Heads Meier, Mischa ;  Männlein-Robert, Irmgard )
• B02 - Hunger as a threat of religious and social orders - Communication of threat and coping in Christian societies (1570 - 1980) (Project Head Holzem, Andreas )
• B03 - Avalanches as a threat to social orders. Traditions of coping with catastrophes in the central Alps (19th and 20th c.) (Project Head Johler, Reinhard )
• B05 - AIDS as threat to political order and to professional codes of conducts. Medical professionals and AIDS in East and West Germany (1981-89) (Project Head Wiesing, Urban )
• C05 - Threat to political orders in African developing countries (Project Head Hasenclever, Andreas )
• C07 - Apocalypticism as a communication of threats: Prophetic movements in colonial Peru (16th century) (Project Head Dürr, Renate )
• D02 - Josephinisms, the Catholic Church, and the rural nobility. Constellations of threat in inner Austria (Project Head Schindling, Anton )
• D03 - Nobility and Bourgeoisie. Poor nobles between competing models of society, 1700 - 1900 (Project Heads Brendle, Franz ;  Frie, Ewald )
• D04 - The USA and the Soviet Union. Transformations of the competition of global political orders 1975 1989 (Project Heads Kucher, Katharina ;  Schild, Georg )
• E01 - Ordo amplissimus. The threat to the Eastern Roman imperial elite under Emperor Justinian I. (Project Heads Schmidt-Hofner, Sebastian ;  Weisweiler, John )
• E02 - Viri absentes. Re-ordering of gender orders in the context of Roman expansion (2nd - 1st century BC) (Project Heads Eberle, Ph.D., Lisa ;  Meier, Mischa ;  Patzold, Steffen ;  Schmidt-Hofner, Sebastian )
• E03 - Threats to the socio-political order in the 14th and 15th c. The end of dynasties (Project Head Widder, Ellen )
• E04 - Threat communication, coping practices and financial market speculation. Stock market booms, crashes and knowledge practices (18th - 19th century) (Project Heads Dürr, Renate ;  Menning, Daniel )
• E05 - Salinization and soil degradation as threats to the agrarian orders in Russia, Kazakhstan/Tajikistan and Australia since 1945 (Project Heads Feaux de la Croix, Jeanne ;  Frie, Ewald ;  Gestwa, Klaus )
• E06 - Threat and diversity in the urban context. Ethnically heterogeneous and unequal urban districts in the global South (Project Head Nieswand, Boris )
• E07 - Re-ordering processes in humanitarian emergency response: local and global negotiation strategies (Project Head Alex, Gabriele )
• F01 - Transformation through threat. Threatened Orders and the development of the late Roman monarchy/monarchies (Project Heads Blochmann, Simone ;  Meier, Mischa )
• F02 - From Carolingian order to “société féodale”? Threatened Order and change in the Carolingian world (Project Heads Grabowsky, Annette ;  Patzold, Steffen )
• F03 - Craftsmen – farmers – clergymen. Threats to social-moral systems of order in religious literary discourse (15th - 17th century) (Project Heads Holzem, Andreas ;  Ridder, Klaus )
• F04 - Colonial order as Threatened Order: the Sangley revolts and Spanish massacres in Manila (1603, 1639, 1662, 1686) (Project Heads Dürr, Renate ;  Hahn, Philip )
• F06 - Humor in social movements (1975-86): Dis-ordering und re-ordering by affective strategies of diagnosis and mobilization (Project Head Scheer, Monique )
• F07 - The struggle for international order. On the integration of affected population groups into the United Nations system (Project Heads von Bernstorff, Jochen ;  Hasenclever, Andreas )
• F08 - ‘Threatened Solidarities’. Mobilising discourses and practices in refugee aid (Project Head Scheer, Monique )
• F09 - The threatened order of the ‘globalized’ world. Conceptions of globalization, political awakening and social debate in the USA, Great Britain, and the Federal Republic of Germany (1990s and 2000s) (Project Head Eckel, Jan )
• G01 - Platonism and Christianity in late antiquity: literary strategies of threat communication in Porphyrios and Eusebios (Project Heads Drecoll, Volker Henning ;  Männlein-Robert, Irmgard )
• G02 - Spiritual women’s communities in the 18th century. Conceptions of order and threat communication during the enlightenment and secularisation (Project Head Hirbodian, Sigrid )
• G03 - A ‘genealogy of hybridity’. The Threatened Orders of the multicultural Istrian peninsula (1970 - 2013) (Project Head Johler, Reinhard )
• G04 - End of Empire. Re-Ordering in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada (1960 - 1980) (Project Head Frie, Ewald )
• G05 - Threatened but stable medical systems of knowledge. Ebola in West Africa and endangered orders of medicine (2013 - 2016) (Project Heads Tümmers, Henning ;  Wiesing, Urban )
• G06 - Past Futures of Threatened Orders. Alternative racial orders in speculative fictions and realities in the U.S. (Project Heads Franke, Astrid ;  Hirschfelder, Nicole )
• G07 - Media reflections: Threat discourse and the American order since the attacks of September 11, 2001 (Project Heads Sachs-Hombach, Klaus ;  Schild, Georg ;  Thon, Jan-Noel )
• Z - Administration (Project Heads Frie, Ewald ;  Meier, Mischa )
• Ö - Experiences – expectations – results. Threatened Orders between scientific analysis and public discussion (Project Heads Brüning, Christina ;  Frie, Ewald ;  Grewe, Bernd-Stefan ;  Hanke, Barbara ;  Johler, Reinhard )

• Applicant Institution: Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen
• Spokespersons: Professor Dr. Ewald Frie, until 8/2016; Professor Dr. Mischa Meier, since 8/2016