Conceived through Practice: Unearthing the Security Promise Norm and its Contested Meanings

• Applicant: Professorin Antje Wiener, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Political Science ; Principles of Law and Jurisprudence
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 544962752

To warrant ‘peace and security’ has been an integral part of the post-1945 United Nations (UN) Charter Order which highlights “peace, justice, and strong institutions” in Chapter VII of its Charter. The UN’s commitment to the principle has been demonstrated by facilitating its implementation for decades. While disagreements persist, “UN members in principle accept the supreme authority of the Security Council in questions of war and peace, including the authority to legitimize military interventions” (Lake, Martin and Risse 2021). The proposed project begins from the observation that while the promise of peace and security has enjoyed wide recognition in the UN Charter Order and is almost all-pervasive in the International Relations literature, we know relatively little about how it achieved this guiding role in international relations. And, perhaps more importantly, what does the promise hold in light of today’s catastrophic times? The leading question is therefore twofold: how has the security promise become a norm (strand 1: historical emergence), and what does the norm hold in store for today’s global world (strand 2: present substance)? As the Research Unit’s frame notes, the security promise remains conceptually underexplored in International Relations (IR). In a world political context marked by multiple threats and an international politics driven by novel types of “deep contestation” this lack of systematic assessment represents a puzzling and pressing concern. Examining the norm’s historical emergence (UN documents, IR literature) and current effect (UN Security Council; climate Conferences of the Parties, COPs) within the UN’s institutional setting is therefore this RP’s main research objective (RO 1). To do this, the planned research retraces the emergence of the security promise retrospectively, paired by multi-sited ethnographic research on the ‘norm bundles’ of ‘climate change’ and ‘war’. It aims to shed light on transformations of state-society relations (RO 2) and contribute to a novel pluralistic approach to the role and effect of the security promise in catastrophic times (RO 3). The research is interlinked with RP3 and speaks to RP5 and RP1.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 5870: The Promise of Security in Catastrophic Times
• International Connection: Sweden, United Kingdom
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Dr. Markus Gehring, Ph.D.; Giovanni Mantilla, Ph.D.; Professorin Ann Towns, Ph.D.