Research
Current Research Projects
Global Sociology of Elite Conflicts
The research project links topics of peace and conflict studies with a global sociology of elites using examples from Asia (Cambodia), Africa (Ghana), Latin America (Argentina), and Europe (Spain). The goal is to conduct an analysis of "power elites" (according to Charles Wright Mills) as a social field in the sense of Pierre Bourdieu. On the one hand, the project examines the impact of social upheavals, conflicts, and violent events on the structure of the field. On the other hand, it asks about the different social groups within the field, the differences in their habitus, and their socio-historical emergence. The focus of the field analysis, however, is not solely on a national space. Rather, the fields of power and the processes that affect them are also analyzed as transregional and global configurations. For various reasons, the fields of power do not coincide with the national "container" (Ulrich Beck). The project deals with 1) the socio-historical emergence of power elites, 2) the current social structure of the power elite, 3) a discourse analysis of the imagination of power in the field of power, and 4) an analysis of habitus types within the elite and their conflict resolution patterns. Various methods will be used to generate data, including historical studies, social network analyses in social media, participant observation at elite events, habitus-hermeneutic interviews, and discourse material produced by the actors under study. The study explicitly does not focus on political, cultural, or economic functional elites but on the power elite of each country, which exercises control over the state apparatus, the economy, and prevailing cultural and religious institutions through the occupation of power positions.