Research Field I Knowing the Enemy

The Research Field “Knowing the Enemy” studies the ambivalences that emerge from knowledge production in contexts of conflictual transculturation. The call to “know your enemy” will be raised in any community facing entrenched competition over economic, cultural, or symbolic resources. 

Typically, this knowledge is produced by a set of institutions, discourses, and social practices that range from informal networks sharing perceived threats to various forms of pseudo-science and formal institutions of “enemy studies.” While enmity generally plays a key role for the establishment and maintenance of social and political cohesion, knowledge about the enemy that is produced, shared, and contested in situations of social conflict stands out for its ambivalence: Knowing the enemy can be the cause of both anxiety (about their capabilities) and exuberance (on knowing their weaknesses). Knowledge about the enemy’s history, language, and society can be deployed for campaigns of demonization and securitization, but intimate knowledge of the other side can also have a normalizing effect, resulting in everyday contacts and even collaboration. The logic of ambivalent enmity is to ask: To defeat the enemy, should one not try to learn from its strengths?

Projects in this Research Field may cover a broad range of possible topics. Four potential themes, which may serve to illustrate the kind of transdisciplinary and transcultural studies we aim to facilitate, include: academic and pseudo-scientific studies of real or imagined enemies; efforts to learn from or about enemies and their intentions through intelligence operations; attempts to see through the eyes of the enemy by non-dominant states and communities; and the enemization of the natural or non-human world.