ZIB Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen

This contribution is based on the unequivocal normative content of „peace“ in public discourse and at the same time illustrates the context dependency of references to peace. The currently observable "war effects" on peace motivate to take an...

The establishment of International Relations as a field of study in part responded to the experience of World War One. Its consolidation and differentiation after World War Two went hand in hand with the entanglement of the incipient discipline with...

Cases of contestation and de-/legitimation are not only omnipresent in research on the international order and multilateralism. They are also prominently used as concepts in international relations. However, two different research camps deal with...

Peace is too complex to be researched in a single academic discipline, not to mention to be depicted in a single one of its theories. IB can also contribute to multidisciplinary research into peace. However, it has largely lost sight of it in its...

The crisis phenomena of recent decades are characterised by substantive overlaps, concurrences, normative ambiguities and unclear perspectives for addressing. As they demonstrate, crises are also normative crises. Since pluralisation and the...

The article offers a feminist contribution on violence and order in patriarchal societies, problematising how gender-insensitive analyses overlook important forms of violence and thus fail to fully understand both causes and dynamics of armed...

The COVID-19 crisis is also a crisis of norms. While the role of norms addressing individual behavior or the societal level in this pandemic has already attracted scholarly attention, this article analyzes the behavior of states from a specific...

In the wake of Russia’s war on Ukraine, Chancellor Olaf Scholz proclaimed in February 2022 a turning point – Zeitenwende – of German foreign policy. However, geopolitical challenges and the debate about a new German foreign policy date back to...

This contribution to the forum argues that norm research would profit from a rationalist perspective, particularly with regard to the strategic and instrumental use of norms. The article develops the concept of ‘norm-washing’ – the...

The contribution reflects on recent proposals for a multidimensional perspective on norm dynamics and discusses their added value concerningthe concept of norm clusters, which is situated as a meso-level between individual norms as the basic unit...

For some years now, norms research has been more intensively concerned with complex relationships between norms. Against this background, the article argues that the concept of norm collisions is a useful as well as necessary extension of the...

Research on international norm dynamics faces the challenge of analytically capturing the interpretations of many different actors in order to be able to account for the complexity, plurality, and changing perspectives in global politics. Recent...

Liberal norms such as human rights have long been the focus of constructivist norm research, but feminist, post- and de-colonial approaches have reconstructed them as ambivalent: The revelation of both emancipatory potential and principled exclusion...

Reflexivity matters, both in relation to oneself as a researcher and in relation to one’s own scientific-theoretical basic assumptions. Reflexivity is a prerequisite for successful communication within research fields, but it is not yet the status...

The increasing importance of artificial intelligence (AI) in many areas of politically relevant decision-making leads to new questions regarding the role of norms. Existing norm research offers important, diversified concepts, particularly on the...

Cooperation in the United Nations Security Council is becoming increasingly difficult due to global political tensions. This is also reflected in the failure to pass resolutions. But what drives the voting behavior of countries in the UN Security...

Women’s rights have been developing in a liberal-progressive manner on the international stage since the creation of the United Nations. Although the contestation of norms is not an unusual phenomenon, the increased critique of the human right to...

What is the significance of the military in German foreign and security policy? This article focuses on the development of the German government's convictions in the confrontation with multiple crises between 2014 and 2020. It shows that the German...