Research Group Halbmayer

Conflict anthropology is a social and cultural anthropological field of research that was constituted in the 1980s, with precursors in political anthropology, legal anthropology, and anthropological research on war and violence.
Conflict anthropology views conflict and violence as a part of social processes embedded in socio-cultural dynamics. It examines cultural codings, social meanings, and social transformational potentials of conflict and forms of violence. With its characteristic perspective on the micro-level, in which people as concrete actors, as well as their ideas and practices, are at the center, conflict anthropology makes social phenomena visible that do not come to light from a mere ethical macro-perspective.

Thus, research in the field of social and cultural anthropology addresses, among other things, strategies and practices of conflict avoidance, enactment and resolution; the agency of supposedly powerless groups and civilians in situations of violence; the forms of social protests and resistance; frictions resulting from translocal processes between global and national norms and local practices and their socio-cultural expressions, but also the transformation of security concepts and practices of non-state actors.