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Subproject B01
Public Peace ('Landfrieden') - Non-Violence and Federal Order in the Early Modern Age

3. Funding period (2022-2025)

The subproject examines the effects of security problems not being delegated to a central authority, but rather of many actors seeing themselves as legitimized to provide security. With a view to historical security policy, the subproject is thus dedicated to forms or political systems of collective security in the pre-modern era. Public peace ('Landfrieden') exemplifies this, as it was a specific form of establishing public security under the conditions of a lack of a monopoly on the use of force. By emphasizing federal elements for peacekeeping in the Holy Roman Empire, the subproject demonstrates that historically there were other ways of perceiving security than a state monopoly on the use of force.

In the 3rd and thus final funding phase of the Collaborative Research Center, the subproject takes a look at two sides of the coin 'Landfrieden': On the one hand, it devotes its research to the area of law, since it was the jurisprudence of the imperial courts that first decided on the definition of breach of public peace ('Landfrieden') and the associated consequences. The central question that the subproject addresses is which heuristics the jurists used to classify cases as breach of the peace and which situations they were thus able to declare as relevant to security (e.g. religious conflicts). Second, the subproject explores the significance of the factor violence. In the second half of the 16th century, forms of subject mobilization and armament developed - with explicit reference to the keeping of public peace - in numerous territories of the Holy Roman Empire, known as "Landesdefensionen." On this level, too, the subproject examines the connection between public peace execution and collective security.

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