Veranstaltungen

The conference brings together researchers from different project contexts, disciplines and theoretical orientations to reflect on their empirical findings and/or theoretical thinking on the manifestations of conflicts in and about spaces. These conflicts range e.g. from territorial disputes, to struggles over cultural preservation and natural resources, to the carving out of virtual territories. Among the most far-reaching challenges today are the conflicts between the often authoritarian reaffirmation of territories and the ongoing globalization, between integration and demarcational rifts in social structures, or between cosmopolitan and geopolitical strategies.

The conference aims to address the still unresolved research gap of whether and how we can understand social conflict as a phenomenon that fundamentally emerges from the spatiality of the social. To address this question, we will draw on the notion of refiguration, which aims to overcome the binary opposition between globalization and de-globalization or the reductionism of ‘geopolitical thinking’. In doing so, we particularly focus on conflicts at all scales (from interpersonal interactions to states) and in different spatial settings (city, region) and figurations (territories, networks, places, and trajectories).