Research Field III Enemy Contact

The Research Field “Enemy Contact” targets the spaces, circumstances, and effects of actual physical encounters between enemies. It analyzes direct relations between declared opponents and inspects enmity as an immediate social relationship. 

The experience of personal meetings is often ambivalent: to suffer physical violence or emotional distress at the hands of others will invoke or fortify hostile emotions that become tangible in hateful representations of enmity. But coming in contact with antagonistic individuals or groups can also lead to processes of appropriation, imitation, or emulation. Contact thus reveals the ambivalent relationship between established views of the enemy and psychological or physical experiences of enmity.

Studies in this Research Field examine enmity-in-action and foreground social practices (actions) as well as their impact upon individuals and groups (experiences). They uncover norms of conduct and concrete behaviors of agents in situations of physical contact with declared enemies and reconstruct the impact such experiences have upon adversarial imaginaries. They investigate modes of apparently unprejudiced and a priori stigmatized interaction in concrete social, political and spatial settings To adequately interpret the different modes of behavior by individual and collective actors, they consider their educational backgrounds, professional careers, and personal networks, and analyze the languages and vocabularies shaping face-to-face communication.

Early career researchers in this Research Field pursue studies drawing on the languages and regional specializations they bring to Ambivalent Enmity. Potential topics may include themes such as: instances of economic or political negotiations with declared enemies; interactions in borderlands marked concurrently by conflict and exchange; experiences of enmity by individuals such as combatants and prisoners of war, but also by antisocial youth who have suffered bodily violence, or amok-shooters and suicide bombers who have unexpectedly survived their missions; and individual or collective expressions of enmity through acts of physical violence.