Research Projects

This project takes the three empires of the Axis – Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan, and the German Third Reich – in order to examine their interconnections from a global perspective, both from centre to centre and through their imperial peripheries. By focussing on networks of what we call ‘fascist brokers’, we explore the specificity – and originality – of the multipolar connectivity between the centres and peripheries of these imperial structures as they came to challenge a global order dominated by the western imperial powers.

This relational perspective towards fascism will lead to a new conceptual framework, decentring the core countries of fascism and the concepts of ‘Europeanness’ that dominate conventional comparative approaches. The global networks associated with the imperial expansion of fascism include the institutions and micro powers involved in circulation, condensation and implementation that constitute the asymmetrical power relations among the actors. Rather than assuming that the borderland exchanges in the Near and Middle East, eastern Europe or Asian and Pacific regions were imposed from the fascist centres, GloFaNet will focus on borderlands as laboratories for indigenous innovations, creative adaptations and multidirectional flows between periphery and centre. We will analyse the imperial interconnectivity, the fluidity of the processes by which fascist imperial regimes connected with one another and engaged their regional peripheries from the end of World War I to 1945.

For the first time, we are taking the borderlands as meaningful units for geopolitical connectivity with the fascist core empires. This innovative project is dedicated to studying the heretofore scarcely researched patterns of influence and resistence, pressures, challenges and rivalries, competition, selective borrowings, misreadings and wishful thinking in a multipolar web of interactions and socio-political brokerage between fascist centres and peripheries.

Social movements identify and discover new forms of knowledge, they produce knowledge and generate alternative epistemologies. Social movements popularize knowledge and challenge hegemonic structures through subversive “counter-knowledge”. They use and criticize scientific expertise and generate new scientific trends – in short: knowledge is of central importance for the constitution, self-understanding, political agitation and the effects of social movements.

A group of scientists from history, sociology, ethnology, law, media studies and political science at the University of Konstanz deal with questions about forms of knowledge in social movements. Following a successful interdisciplinary workshop in October 2019 we plan to institutionalize a third-party funded research group.

The aim is to understand the creation and formation of movement knowledge, the circulation, communication and dissemination, as well as the effects and reception of mobilized “counter-knowledge”. The understanding of social movements as cultures of knowledge is based on the existence of various cognitive technologies that construct knowledge in multiple ways, produce cultures as forms of knowledge with symbolic-expressive components and challenge dominant knowledge regimes.

Further Information

“Radicalization to Violence: Paramilitarism in Fascism and the Radical Right”
Sixth Convention of the International Association for Comparative Fascist Studies (ComFas), Vienna

6-8 October 2023

Paramilitarism is routinely singled out as a main feature of fascist and radical right movements; however, its origins, main features, and impact have not been systematically scrutinized. Against this background, the sixth ComFas Convention aims to bring together researchers from different disciplinary fields, geographical areas, and research traditions and to engage them in a scholarly debate on paramilitarism and radicalization to violence within the field of radical right, fascist, and neo-fascist movements and regimes.

The Convention involved over 65 participants, three keynote speeches by Prof. Andrea Pető (CEU Vienna), Prof. Sven Reichardt (Konstanz University), and Roger Griffin (Oxford Brooks University) and over 50 scholarly presentations, grouped in 13 international panels.

Political ecology is, according to Robbins, a field that critically interrogates the nature–society relations, particularly looking at the power relations that intersect and affect the access to natural resources, in order to reveal disparities and injustices in the distribution of costs and benefits.

Against this background, we want to explore the mutual relationships among political, economic and social acting; discourses and imaginaries of the natural environment; and environmental transformations in the 19^th and 20^th century. By addressing diverse relations that shaped the biophysical environment and ecosystems on a global scale, we intend to connect research projects that address environmental knowledge as a politically contested field in global, imperial and (post) colonial studies.

Further Information

The project examines the role of the United Kingdom´s Home Civil Service within the British political culture in the 20^th Century. On the basis of this it aims to analyse the continuity and change in the influence of professional bureaucratic elites on plitical decision-making processes and the forming of the political will, given the rise of political equality and mass participation in western liberal democratics since the World War One. The focus is on the civil service´s administrative grades, i.e. the higher civil servants on the top of the British government´s departments ("Whitehall").

As a permanent government service the civil service and its unelected officials are officially obliged to keep themselves above party lines and to give the government of the day strictly non-commmitted matter-of-fact advice only. But nonetheless the civil service is rumoured to hold an actually strong influence on the political decision-making of the government. After all, his senior officials inevitably posses almost always much more government experience than their frequently rotated ministers. The project examines the degree and the effects of the political influence of the civil service. Furthermore, it investigates the political role of the higher ministerial bureaucracy in connection with the civil service´s esprit de corps. Until the late 20^th century the civil service featured a very specific class consciousness, that originated from its recruitment from a highly literate elite as well as from a special proximity to the British monarchy. But the elitist composition and the political role of the civil service has also been time and again a topic of fervid public debates in the United Kingdom. Demands for civil service reform kept prime ministers occupied from the days of Churchill to those of Blair, just as novelists like C.P. Snow and TV satirists ("Yes Minister"). By analysing these public debates the project finally aims to tackle processes of change in the public understanding of state and government in the age of mass democracy.