ZIB Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen

This essay presents a Ukrainian point of view on the ongoing public and scholarly discourse in Ukraine regarding Russia’s war of aggression against the country, while also responding to the German discourse. The essay presents the state of the...

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has caught not only politics but also the discipline of International Relations (IR) off guard. The IR debate has been characterised either by inter-theoretical speechlessness or know-it-all attitudes....

This article first looks back at past German debates on the relationship between the theory and practice of international relations (IR). In a three-step process, it then critically examines the self-image of academia in the context of media work,...

The relationship between peace research and security studies has changed. The conceptual distinction is blurred. Peace research can be divided into critical peace research and peace and conflict research, while security studies can be divided into...

The war on Ukraine and the bifurcated discourses (political and academic) around it across different geographies are just one of the myriad manifestations of hierarchies, postcolonial continuities and contestations guiding global politics. The...

Has peace become obsolete as a guiding concept in the discipline of International Relations (IR)? This is the guiding question of this introduction: While research into the causes of war and, above all, Strategic Studies continue to flourish in the...

Social media have both negative (escalating, conflict-stabilizing) and positive (transformative, de-escalating) effects with regard to peacebuilding, an argument that has been widely established in IR and Peace and Conflict Studies. However, the...

In peace and conflict research, processual understandings function as alternatives to too narrow and too broad concepts of peace. Instead of understanding peace as a substantial condition, for example defined by the absence of violence or the...

This contribution shows that peace is a critical concept in parallel to the concept of emancipation in critical theory. Such concepts work as regulative ideals and cannot offer solutions to practical problems. Alas, these principles of critical...

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...