Post-war Periods: Plurality – Temporality – Re/Constructions

About the FRIAS Project Group

The FRIAS project group “Post-war Periods: Plurality – Temporality – Re/Constructions” explores ways of conducting interdisciplinary research into post-war times from a trans-epochal and trans-cultural perspective. A historically reflective examination of post-war periods appears to be highly relevant in view of current debates, particularly on the Ukraine war and the armed conflicts in the Middle East. The focus will extend beyond the European-Western experiences of the 20th and 21st centuries and aims to open up new vistas on post-war times as a subject of historical, cultural, social, and legal research.

The project group addresses post-war periods as an ambivalent and heterogeneous phenomenon. In doing so, the project group seeks to address the different ways of experiencing, seeing, and interpreting post-war times depending on social status, ethnicity, gender, age, and so on. The project group is interested in the conditions under which it is possible to identify post-war periods as such and in which narratives, semantics, practices, legal concepts, images, and artifacts play a role in the cultural constructions of post-war times.

The project group focuses in particular on the respective temporal shape of post-war conditions. To what extent are they seen as a purely transitory phenomenon between war and peace, and when might they be perceived as a (historical) “period” sui generis? The different conceptions of future post-war periods and the significance they have for agency in times of war will also be addressed.

Finally, the project group will look at practices of reconstruction in physical as well as emotional, artistic-literary, legal, economic, and natural terms. The project group aims to establish post-war times as an object and field of collaborative and interdisciplinary research at the University of Freiburg in the long term and to develop and apply for suitable funding formats for this purpose.

Period of Funding: October 2024 – September 2025

Project Group Members