VIOLENT CONFLICTS AND GLOBALIZATION

Among the dynamics of globalization are not only processes of economic, political or cultural integration, but also conflicts staged and carried out in the horizon of world society. Such conflicts cannot be attributed to one particular place or region. Instead they are characterized by a multiplication of relevant spatial and placial references. Driven by the expansion of economic, social, political and communication networks, such plurilocal conflicts seem to play an increasing role in the dynamics of world society (1). In social theory, however, little attention has been payed to such processes so far. This is partly due to the tendency of globalization research to conceive its subject in terms of integration: the concept is commonly considered to refer to the expansion and intensification of informational, social, economic, political and cultural exchanges. In this perspective, conflicts – especially violent ones – appear as disturbances or disruptions.

Against this background, this research explores the relation between globalization and violent conflicts. It asks how violent conflicts contribute to the production of »globality«. How are places and spaces produced in plurilocal conflicts and how do they relate to each other? How can these processes be theorized and systematically investigated in empirical research? To answer these questions, the research combines classical conflict sociology with a constructivist approach in globalization sociology that is based in communication theory. The former reconstructs conflict as a form of socialization in which social structures are (re-)produced and transformed by processing an antagonism (2); the latter conceives globalization in terms of observation and communication processes which produce converging horizons of imagination and expectation and thus produce and entertain the fiction of a »global public« (3). Combined the two approaches open up an alternative perspective on the relation between globalization and violent conflict. Instead of considering conflicts as indicators of dysfunctionalities, attention is drawn to the production of social structures in violent conflicts and thus to the complex relations between dynamics of violence, dynamics of conflict and dynamics of globalization. The interplay between a given conflict on the one hand and global processes of observation and communication on the other is of crucial importance (4). This perspective emphasizes the complex interdependencies between violent interaction on the one hand, and the observation of and communication about this interaction by third parties and, hence, draws, attention to the translocal effects of violence.

(1) In empirical research, such conflicts are sometimes labelled as »transnational«. This concept is, however, avoided here, as it is bound to the idea of national states and evokes first and foremost the image of a transgression of state boundaries.
(2) See especially Simmel, Georg. 1904. The sociology of conflict. I. The American Journal of Sociology 9, no. 4: 490-525, and Coser, Lewis A. 1956. The functions of social conflict. Glencoe: Free Press.
(3) See for example Holzer, Boris, Fatima Kastner and Tobias Werron. 2014. From globalization to world society. Neo-institutional and systems-theoretical perspectives. New York: Routledge.
(4) For a first conceptual sketch see Koloma Beck, Teresa and Tobias Werron. 2013. Gewaltwettbewerbe. ›Gewalt‹ in globalen Konkurrenzen um Aufmerksamkeit und Legitimität. In Ordnung und Wandel in der Weltpolitik. Konturen einer Soziologie der Internationalen Beziehungen. Edited by Stephan Stetter. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 239-267. (English translation in preparation)