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Research focus

This discipline explores the political aspects of a question: What is the genuinely political quality of social relationships? On the one hand, we probe the present social theories to determine how they capture this quality. The selection of the theory will determine whether the politics of a situation are determined by power or by violence, by establishing order or by suspending order, by consensus or antagonism, by economics or ecology, by unity or plurality. On the other hand, the question of politics is explored in relation to specific contextual fields. At the core of all considerations are the analytics of security technologies. These analytics have a close relationship with the issues of the political sphere, because turning social issues into security issues will always be a particularly intensive mode of politization.

Four dimensions of current “security measures” are of special interest for the research and teaching activities supported by this chair:

• temporal anticipatory techniques of future risks (e.g., probability calculation, scenario planning or simulation techniques)
• territorial strategies for securing connections and mobilities (e.g., exception zones, enclaves or logistic corridors)
• legal media for regulating process flows (e.g., administrative flows, controls or check procedures)
• material constitution and stabilization of collectivity (e.g., through infrastructures, affect modulation mechanisms or other media that secure connections).

Each security measure constitutes its own thematic research focus that has developed since the 1990s in order to achieve a worldwide control of pandemics. When probing global health risks, those contacts that connect humans with microbes, animals and inanimate objects to form infectious communities. The securitization of health is thus always a politicized securitization of social contacts and collective cohabitation.