Asst. Prof. Dr. Christine Andrä 

While the condemnation of war for moral and religious reasons has a long history, the understanding that humans need not passively accept the fact of war but can take practical action against it has developed only more recently. Emerging in the nineteenth century, the idea grew firmly in the first half of the twentieth and today, it is taken for granted in the international politics of the Global North/West. As existing research has shown, this understanding is a historical achievement, yet it also entails a number of dilemmas: it deems some wars problematic while normalizing others; it ascribes a capacity for taking action against war to some people, but not to others; and it obscures the role of war and violence in the development of modernity. These dilemmas are founded upon discriminatory and exclusionary "civilizational” ideas. Therefore, I plan to study this history of the understanding of war as a problem for humans to solve, to question some of the inherent assumptions in this, and to reformulate it. The project focuses on war as a problem of deviance from behavioral norms that can be addressed by means of empirical social-scientific and humanistic knowledge. These insights should help us move from a critique of war to a more inclusive reconstruction of the modern problem of war.