FOR 2898:  Military Cultures of Violence - Illegitimate Military Violence from the Early Modern Period to the Second World War

• Subject Area: Humanities
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 407133841

The requested DFG Research Group ‘Military Cultures of Violence’aims to fill an important gap in both scholarship on military history andresearch on violence: the introduction of the concept of ‘militarycultures of violence’ is designed to allow for the systematic descriptionand explanation of sometimes very divergent acts of violence on thepart of regular European armed forces that were viewed incontemporary assessments as illegitimate. Such acts are alreadydocumented in numerous individual studies, though as yet neither onthis chronological and geographical scale nor as part of a widercollaborative and comparative project. ‘Military cultures of violence’are defined as the violent practices proceeding from members of acollective military agent of violence belonging to a state or a state-likeentity, and the associated interpretative ascriptions and discourses.The research group investigates in which ways and to what extentspecific military cultures of violence developed in the regular armies ofthe European great powers from the early modern period to the end ofthe Second World War. In the framework of the sub-projects, anattempt will be made to identify in synchronous and diachronic studiesthe military cultures of violence subjected to continual transformation,map out their determining factors, and classify their significance andtheir explanatory value for military acts of violence on the part of therespective regular agents of violence. The focus of scholarly interesthere is physical violence regarded by contemporaries as illegitimate intimes of both war and peace, for which reason the question of thechanging yardsticks of legitimacy and illegitimacy of violence andconditions for their transformation will be repeatedly posed.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• International Connection: Austria, Russia

Projects

• Illegitimate Violence in the French and Austrian Militaries during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1789–1815) (Applicant Bührer, Tanja )
• Koordinierungsprokjekt (Applicant Neitzel, Sönke )
• Military cultures of v iolence, as characterised by the two ‘Great Turkish Wars’ (1683 1718) The Habsburg and Ottoman armies in comparison (Applicants Asche, Matthias ;  Koller, Markus )
• Military Cultures of Violence among British and Commonwealth Armed Forces in the First and Second World Wars (1914–1945) (Applicants Neitzel, Sönke ;  Schenck, Marcia )
• The German military and excessive violence during the Franco-Prussian War, 1870/71 (Applicant Aschmann, Birgit )
• Violent Men between Great War, Revolution and Second World War (1905–1945): Cossack Military Violence under Different Regimes (Applicant Behrends, Jan C. )
• Violent practices and discourses on violence during the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) (Applicant Füssel, Marian )

• Spokesperson: Professor Dr. Sönke Neitzel