FOR 5870:  The Promise of Security in Catastrophic Times

• Subject Area: Social and Behavioural Sciences ; Humanities
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 544962752

What is security in a time marked by entangled crises, catastrophes and loss? The Research Unit PROMISE engages in a concerted interdisciplinary and collaborative research effort to comprehensively examine ongoing reconfigurations of democratic states’ promises of security in ‘catastrophic times’. We start from the observation that we are currently experiencing a pervasive, global crisis of peace and security. Core certainties about the protective functions of democratic states and multilateral institutions, taken for granted for decades, are rapidly eroding. PROMISE examines governmental and societal responses to three closely entangled and mutually reinforcing crisis dimensions: the rise of war and global conflict, the global trend of autocratization, and the ecological crisis. In times of growing awareness that not everything can be protected and saved, we study tensions between citizens’ expectations and states as well as International Organization’s (IOs) attempts to reconfigure their protective roles: how do states and societies struggle over priorities and limits of protection in times of multiplying crises? Who or what is protected, saved, or salvaged, and who or what is abandoned as a result? PROMISE generates new knowledge by assessing and comparing changes in democratic states’ modes of protection – from triage to inclusive self-organisation –, and by theorising the transformation of promises of security in catastrophic times along four dimensions. Our collective research places a strong emphasis on an analysis of the present. Our nine research projects jointly examine current governmental and societal strategies for coping with and preparing for a constellation of crises and disasters that have the potential to change and disrupt our lives in ways that are neither incremental nor temporary. Our main focus is on European states and their societies, with an extension to the functions of multilateral institutions (United Nations) and to the regions of South America (Colombia), North America (USA) and the Middle East (Turkey/Kurdistan). Each project addresses a specific set of mutually reinforcing crisis dimensions within our overall diagnosis of catastrophic times. PROMISE’s core disciplinary strength is in political science and sociology, with significant expertise coming from peace and security studies, International Relations and international law, communication studies, anthropology and area studies. By analysing conflicts and negotiations over the fundamental promise of security made by states – and, by extension, IOs and regional organisations – from multiple perspectives, we seek to make a fresh and far-reaching contribution to the study of security in a new era.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• International Connection: Poland, Sweden, United Kingdom

Projects

• Changing Notions and Practices of Defence and Security in Finland and the Baltic States since 2014 (Applicant Geis, Anna )
• Conceived through Practice: Unearthing the Security Promise Norm and its Contested Meanings (Applicant Wiener, Ph.D., Antje )
• Coordination Funds (Applicant Schröder, Ursula )
• Defensive Publics and their Imagined Security Communities in the Digital Realm (Applicant Kleinen-von Königslöw, Katharina )
• Infrastructures of Protection. Planning for Catastrophes to Come (Applicants Hentschel, Christine ;  Schröder, Ursula )
• Life under Pressure. Political Intervention in the Face of Urbicide (Applicant Krasmann, Susanne )
• Protection Mainstreaming through Valuation Practices in the United Nations (Applicant Niemann, Holger )
• Reclaiming the State’s Security Promise from the Perspective of Statelessness (Applicant Cayli, Ph.D., Eray )
• Security Utopias in Catastrophic Times (Applicant Perkowski, Nina )

• Spokesperson: Professorin Dr. Ursula Schröder