Area Studies and Law from Colonial Times to the Cold War: the Example of the University of Tübingen

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Jochen von Bernstorff
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History ; Public Law
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 442981028

This interdisciplinary project explores the history of Area Studies and Law Studies at the University of Tübingen from colonial times to the recent past. Both fields of science wanted to provide the colonial state with useful knowledge for the classification and control of foreign societies. Area experts used their local experience and scientific knowledge to participate in the transformation of economy and community in non-European areas. Law Studies developed their own legal-dogmatic figures and justification narratives that deviated from current European international law and German legal norms and thus counteracted the stigma of the illegitimacy of colonization.The project analyzes and compares how spatial Area Studies (including colonial, foreign and overseas geography, development research) and jurisprudence adapted to changing political and institutional contexts and asserted themselves at the University of Tübingen across different political periods. It examines the horizons of experience and research practices of scholars, their forms of knowledge and narratives of usefulness.Key questions are: What relevance did colonialism have for teaching and research in Area Studies and Law, but also for a university as a whole? To what extent and for how long did patterns of thought, categories, orders of knowledge and practices from the colonial period have an effect on science?Three guiding perspectives help to structure the work of the project:1. Practices of knowledge production: How did the scientists involved construct and legitimize their knowledge orders? How did they change these under the pressure of new political conditions? When did new research practices become established? To what extent did the two disciplines draw on the knowledge of the colonized in their knowledge production? When and how did ideas of 'civilizing Mission' and 'modernization' begin to erode?2. Politics of knowledge: How did the individual researchers position themselves in the academic field? What significance did colonial knowledge production have for these actors and their institutes? How was the knowledge they produced used? How did political motives change and to what extent did it have an impact on the claim to produce useful knowledge?3. Communication colonial knowledge and the reflexivity of the scientists: To what extent did the scientists participate in colonial politics or in colonial associations? When and how did they take a public stand on colonial issues, colonial revisionism or decolonization? W hat relevance did (post-) colonial issues have in academic teaching? How did researchers in ego-documents reflect on the limits of their knowledge, to what extent did they question and legitimize their work?

• DFG Programme: Research Grants