The Leibniz Research Alliance "Crises in a Globalised World" was a fusion of 24 Leibniz institutes that investigated the mechanisms and dynamics of crises as well as their mutual interdependencies in an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary manner. The alliance existed from 2012 to 2021.

Research

In a globalised world, basic malfunctions of economic, social, political, and ecological systems are often interconnected in complex ways that endow crises with a new quality. If we are to cope with crises successfully, a comprehensive assessment of their causes is needed, as a basis for concerted action. Such an advance is only possible if exchange between scholars, political decision-makers, and the wider public is intensified. Against this background, the distinctive mission of the Leibniz Research Alliance ‘Crises in a Globalised World’ was to cut across three sets of boundaries—between disciplines, between different thematic fields in which crises figure, and between the academic, political, and societal spheres. The Alliance’s strategic goal is to gather together the expertise which the different participating institutes have accumulated—on financial and debt crises, environmental crises, food crises, and crises of political orders—and use this to generate generalisable knowledge about the processes, dynamics, and patterns of crises, about their systemic character, and about the suitability and social acceptability of policies devised to cope with them. This knowledge can then be applied in the resolution of future crises.

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Project archive

Workshop archive

former members of the alliance

Working Groups

Knowledge Transfer

The Alliance was to bundle the research carried out in and between the 24 Leibniz institutes and make it accessible to a broad public and to political decision-makers. Activities from the area of knowledge transfer included the Alliance's own event series "Crisis Talks" and the interview series "Crisis Interviews". These formats provided a space for exchange between academia and the public and enable discursive engagement with current crisis phenomena by researchers and their audiences. One project that engaged in artistic exploration of crises and crisis research was "Making Crisis Visible."

Due to the global outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the collaborative is also providing skills to respond to economic, social, and political developments in the context of the corona crisis. One format in which such impacts were discussed with crisis researchers was Crisis Calls.

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Crisis Talks

Crisis Interviews

Making Crises Visible

Crisis Calls

Coordinator
Dr Stefan Kroll
PRIF – Peace Research Institute Frankfurt
Frankfurt, Germany
kroll@prif.org