Centre for Peace Research and Peace Education

Researching epistemic and social foundations of violent conflicts lies the center of our approach to transdisciplinary peace studies. A broad understanding of politics and violence enables us to comprehend peace and justice as concrete challenges and action-guiding utopias for actively shaping social participation, dignity and justice.

Our approaches to peace research and peace education are multi-, inter- and transdisciplinary. In research and teaching, we interweave perspectives from the humanities, social sciences and cultural studies with approaches from educational science, among others. For instance, we consider relations of power and violence within their interrelationships with social and personal learning processes. In cooperation with committed lecturers and international research partners, we work on the foundations of a peaceful and simultaneously resilient coexistence. We consider local confrontations and events in a global context, as well as international politics in its interactions with the individual and the supposedly private sphere.

We are currently working in the following research areas:

• Diversity-conscious education: differences as projection screens and resources, intersectionality and criticism of power, empowerment through and transgression of identity categories
• Peace education and transformative pedagogies: global citizenship education, critical human rights education, global learning, and related critical perspectives on education and society
• (Scientific) knowledge and (non-)violence: epistemic and political violence, post- and decolonial perspectives on relations of domination in colonial modernity, feminist and intersectional research on peace and conflict
• Shared living space in post-migrant society: community and conviviality, practices of low-violence relations in global relations of inequality and injustice