Global Security and worldviews

Global security dynamics are in flux. The same applies to the way different actors perceive security, conflict, and major threats.

Part of the unit’s research involves understanding trends in how different governments and international organisations deal with new threats and conflict lines: Everything from how to build resilience, how to combat violent extremism, or how to create order and lasting peace in areas that have long been raged by conflict.

However, our perspective specifically goes beyond the state, and is also characterized by a focus on how non-state actors understand key concepts such as order, peace, security and conflict.

Our research also contributes to an understanding of theological, religious and ideological conflicts, and the particular narratives that sustain these conflicts: This may in part be about tensions between Russia on the one hand and the West on the other, the rise of the new right in Europe and in the United States or the mobilization to transnational jihadism, particularly the movements of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.

Central themes and issues

• Mass mobilisation and transnationalisation: What role does technology, media, ideology, religion, emotions and worldviews play?
• Competing conceptions of order: What visions of order do non-state actors or other types of sociopolitical movements draw on, when they challenge established power structures?
• Interventions and security practices: How do global, regional, national and local actors approach conflict management, state-building and stabilisation efforts - and with what consequences?
• Conflict escalation and new forms of war/warfare: How are contemporary conflicts impacted by new technologies such as.artificial intelligence, by new threats such as cyber warfare or other forms of greyzone warfare like disinformation?