Hauptinhalt

Einladung zu Fellowvorträgen

Der Sonderforschungsbereich lädt zu den Fellow Talks 2025 ein. Aktuelle Gastwissenschaftler:innen stellen in diesem Vortragsformat ihre aktuellen Forschungsvorhaben vor und diskutieren sie mit den Zuhörer:innen. Die Vorträge finden auf Englisch statt.

Veranstaltungsdaten

Dr. Ilkay Yilmaz: “The Armenian Question in the Ottoman East: Security, Violence and Knowledge Production”

This article examines how the Ottoman government framed the Armenian Question as a security issue and how this framing influenced its security practices from the Treaty of Berlin in1878 until the constitutional revolution in 1908. To analyze the relationship between Ottoman security policies and the long-term physical and structural violence against Armenians, this study explores "security memory," "accelerated security knowledge production," and "infrastructures of security" through the lens of critical security studies. This perspective also helps to investigate how the articulation of the Armenian Question reshaped the structure and functions of the Ottoman state. The study focuses on two key temporalities: the narrative construction of the Armenian Question in international diplomacy and the development of security infrastructure, which was closely intertwined with violence against the Armenian community in the Eastern Provinces. By examining the complex relationship between modern state formation and security policies, the study reassesses the entanglements between European colonial techniques and Ottoman governance in the region.

Yazid Benhadda: "A Colonial Genealogical Approach to Securitisation: Archive, Target Population, and the Normal”

Securitisation theory (ST) emerged as an important theoretical innovation in the field of security studies during the 1990s. Many have criticised the initiators of this scholarship – known as the Copenhagen School – for normative (Aradau, 2004; Charrett, 2009), methodological (Balzacq, 2010, pp. 31-54; Williams, 2015), and conceptual (Ciuta, 2009) shortcomings. One of these shortcomings is the absence of attention to colonial histories and to the place of race and racism in theorising securitisation (Howell and Richter-Montpetit, 2019; Gomes and Marques, 2021). I will establish that ST’s initial colonial amnesia was the result of centring three elements: referent object, speech acts, and the exceptional. Understanding securitisation as the construction of a phenomenon as a security problem and building on the Paris School’s contributions and other critical voices, I will argue for supplanting these three elements with the notions of target population, archive, and the normal. This can enable the securitisation scholarship to better make sense of the coloniality of securitisation processes and its practices.