Käte Hamburger Kolleg / Centre for Global Cooperation Research
Schifferstraße 44
47059 Duisburg
Deutschland
Tel: +49 (0)203 379-5233
Fax: +49 (0)203 379-5276
E-Mail: kuehn@gcr21.uni-due.de
Forschungsprojekt am Centre
Ambiguity and Peace – How Ambiguities Influence Global Cooperation
Peacebuilding interventions can be ambiguous endeavours. They take place in a liminal social space offering an ambiguous field which keeps open interpretational freedom so that various practices can be justified and provisionally explained. The research project proposed here for a Käte Hamburger Fellowship 2019/20 within the framework of the “Pathways and Mechanisms of Global Cooperation”-theme aims to conceptualise the ambiguities which are part of peace (or conflict) processes. It will develop a framework for analysis of such ambiguities, and explore how they can be a means to understand conflict dynamics in three cases, Afghanistan, Israel/Palestine, and Ukraine. The cases will be analysed with different foci of ambiguity: on military practice, land use and ownership titles, and international treaties. These can be mechanisms for forceful disambiguation, which – other than tolerance for ambiguities – can drive conflict and violence. The variety of cases allows establishing interdisciplinary connections to anthropology, security studies, legal as well as cultural studies. This proposal offers a short description of why ambiguities abound in the world but are seldom recognized in academic research; it explains why this is a research gap in peace and conflict research; and how the new concept helps make sense of global cooperation. It sketches how the analytical concept helps explain the function of ambiguities in conflictive dynamics, and how disambiguation moves create frictions in peacebuilding cooperation. Concluding, it presents some of the guiding assumptions and (early) findings of the case studies Afghanistan, Israel/Palestine, and Ukraine.
Main research questions:
How do ambiguities in conflict understandings contribute to how conflicts play out? How is global cooperation influenced by such ambiguities?
How can ambiguities, deriving from different meanings belonging to different systems of reference, be reconstructed and analysed?
Vita
04/2018 – 03/2019 | Humboldt University at Berlin Interim Professor of International Relations at the Institute for Social Sciences |
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Since 2017 | Bonn International Centre for Conversion (BICC) Associate Researcher |
04/2016 – 09/2017 | Helmut-Schmidt-University - University of the German Federal Armed Forces Hamburg Institute for International Relations Associate Professor |
04/2015 – 03/2016 | Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg Interim Professor of Comparative Politics and Prejudice Research at the Institute for Political Science |
04/2013 – 03/2015 | Humboldt University at Berlin Interim Professor of International Relations at the Institute for Social Sciences |
10/2009 – 03/2013 | Helmut-Schmidt-University - University of the German Federal Armed Forces Hamburg Institute for International Relations Senior Researcher and Senior Lecturer |
10/2003 – 09/2009 | Helmut-Schmidt-University – University of the German Federal Armed Forces Hamburg Institute for International Relations Researcher and Lecturer |
01/2010 – 07/2010 | Queen’s Centre for International Relations, Kingston/Ontario, Canada Visiting Research Fellow |
Bücher und ausgewählte Publikationen
Kühn, Florian P. (2019). 'Universal Patterns of Intervention: Practice, no -isms', Conflict, Security & Development 19 (3), 257-262 (Special Forum on 'The "West" and the "Rest" in international interventions', guest edited with Mandy Turner). |
Kühn, Florian P. (2018). Afghanistan coming asunder: The continuity of the post-9/11 transition. In H.-J. Gießmann & R. Mac Ginty, eds. How regimes change. Cheltenham and Northampton: Edward Elgar (in print). |
Kühn, Florian P. (2017). Risikopolitik. Eine Einführung, Wiesbaden: Springer VS (Series ‘Elemente der Politik‘). |
Turner, M. and Kühn, Florian P. (eds.) (2016). The Politics of International Intervention. The Tyranny of Peace. London and New York: Routledge. |
Kühn, Florian P. (2016). The Ambiguity of Things: Souvenirs from Afghanistan. Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 10 (1), 97-115. DOI:10.1080/17502977.2015.1137397. |
Kühn, Florian P. (2016). Introduction: Contemporary Modalities of Violence. IReflect – Student Journal of International Relations, 3 (S1), 3-14. online ireflect-journal.de/special-issue-modalities-of-violence |
Kühn, Florian P. and Pospisil, J. (2016). The resilient state: new regulatory modes in international approaches to state building?, Third World Quarterly, 37 (1), 1-16, DOI:10.1080/01436597.2015.1086637. |
Kühn, Florian P. (2016). International Peace Practice: Ambiguity, Contradictions, and Perpetual Violence, in M. Turner & F. P. Kühn (eds.), The Politics of International Intervention. The Tyranny of Peace, 21-38. |
Kühn, Florian P. and Blumenberg (2016). Under-complex analogy and basic myths in International Politics: Afghanistan and the ‘Graveyard of Empires’, in B. Bliesemann de Guevara (ed.), Myth in International Relations: An Interpretative Approach to Studying International Relations, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 147-172. |
Kühn, Florian P. and Turner, M. (2016). Introduction: The tyranny of peace and the politics of international intervention, in M. Turner and Florian P. Kühn (eds.), The Politics of International Intervention. The Tyranny of Peace. London: Routledge , 1-18. |
Kühn, Florian P.(2015). Was ist Gleichgewicht? Zur Einordnung von Staaten in Systeme und von Systemen in ihren genealogischen Zusammenhang, in M. Jonas, U. Lappenküper & B. Wegner (Hrsg.). Stabilität durch Gleichgewicht? Balance of Power im internationalen System der Neuzeit. Paderborn: Schöningh, 203-223. |
Kühn, Florian P. and Bliesemann de Guevara, B. (2015). On Afghan Footbaths and Kosovar Sacred Cows: Urban Legends of Intervention. Peacebuilding, 3 (1), 17-35. DOI:10.1080/21647259.2014.969508. |
Kühn, Florian P.(2014). 'We are all in this together …': Deutschland in der Ambiguität der Afghanistanintervention, in M. Daxner (Hrsg.), Deutschland in Afghanistan, Oldenburg: BIS, 193-211. |
Kühn, Florian P. and Bliesemann de Guevara (2013). The political economy of statebuilding: Rents, taxes, and perpetual dependency, in D. Chandler and T.D. Sisk (eds.), International Statebuilding: Concepts, Themes and Practices - A Routledge Handbook, London: Routledge, 219-30. |
Kühn, Florian P. (2010). Sicherheit und Entwicklung in der Weltgesellschaft. Liberales Paradigma und Statebuilding in Afghanistan. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. |
Bliesemann de Guevara, B. and Kühn, Florian P. (2010). Illusion Statebuilding. Warum der westliche Staat so schwer zu exportieren ist. Hamburg: edition Körber-Stiftung. |