Uni-Tübingen

Project C - Ancillary Research Group: The German Debates on Asylum from 1989 to 1993: The Construction, Perception and Instrumentalisation of a "Threatened Order"

Abstract

This project looks at the German debates on Asylum from 1989 to 1993, which were some of the most emotional public debates in the history of the Federal Republic. In particular, it focuses on the construction, perception, and instrumentalisation of threat scenarios. In an exemplary way, it shows how perceptions of threat are intimately tied to the perspectives behind them. Since this conflict took place in a short, densely communicative period in which different processes of historical transformation were interwoven, the "asylum debates" can be used as a prism for examining the way in which competing notions of social and political order for the future of the Federal Republic - some of which dated back to the 1970s - were being negotiated.

Project Team

Project Leader:
Dr. Silke Mende

Ph.D. Students:
Christian Reck

Academic Disciplines and Orientation

Contemporary History

Project-related Lectures and Publications

Mende, Silke

Reck, Christian