BICC will be hosting a two-day international academic conference on “Challenges of organized violence: New research and potentials for conversion” on 27 to 28 October in Bonn. Around 100 experts of various disciplines from Germany and abroad will be taking part.
The conference will approach current dynamics of organized violence from a critical angle and pose a number of important questions that go far beyond Europe: How can and should we address current problems of violence? Can some manifestations of organized violence be eliminated once and for all? Can others be contained and controlled at the very most?
These questions can be reflected by focusing on the respective concepts, means, and practices of organized violence. ‘Concepts’, in BICC’s understanding, are discourses that legitimize the use of violence, such as security policies or military strategies. ‘Means’ refer to the tools and material infrastructure of organized violence, such as the arms industry, conventional weapons (in particular Small Arms and Light Weapons—SALW) or military bases. Visible patterns of behavior are investigated in the ‘practices’ of organized violence which lead BICC to conduct research on rules, norms, and types of actors.
Building on these three dimensions of research at BICC, two intersecting themes have been identified that are of high political relevance and which lend themselves to investigating the meaning of organized violence in societal contexts. These two themes are ‘natural resources’ and ‘migration’.