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Research

Security is a key concept in international as well as national political discussion, the importance of which has grown even more in recent years. Starting in April 2014, researchers from the Philipps-University Marburg and the Justus Liebig University Giessen as well as from the Herder Institute for Historical Eastern and Middle European Research will devote themselves to the topic "Dynamics of Security. Forms of Securitization in Historical Perspective". They are investigating how notions of security developed in history and how they entered the political process. The focus is on the representation and the production of security - processes that are mutually dependent and whose relationship will be explored in historically different dynamics and process structures. The CRC conceptualizes these dynamic processes as 'securitization'. By including historical contexts and questions, the CRC provides a comprehensive analysis of the political dynamics with which processes of securitization and their opposing processes of de-securitization are connected - including their ambivalences and dialectics. In the CRC, securitization is not understood as an always purposeful and predetermined process with a predictable outcome, but as a variable process with overlaps, inconsistencies, regressions and discontinuities.

The disciplinary focus of the 19 subprojects of the Collaborative Research Center is on historical projects, whose period of investigation ranges from antiquity to the present, but the historical subprojects are structurally and substantively linked with subprojects from the social sciences, which are central to the research approach, as well as law and art history. The joint research work of the CRC, which spans the subprojects, is carried out in five conceptual groups that analyze fundamental forms and elements of securitization with systematic intent. The research goal of the CRC is a comprehensive typology of securitization processes.