Research Program

The overarching findings of the “Just Peace Governance” research program, which are presented in the volume “Justice and Peace: The Role of Justice Claims in International Cooperation and Conflict”, point to the following points, among others:

• The questions of the meaning of justice per se and what it implies in a given situation are often central points of reference in political conflicts. Two dimensions of controversy are particularly common in such conflicts over justice: Which subjects of justice should be at the center (usually states/collectives or individuals) and which principle of justice should be applied in a situation (such as equality, equality of opportunity, or different responsibilities depending on the power or status of an actor)?
• Competing claims to justice are never the only factors that drive political conflicts and violence, but they do drive conflicts via causal mechanisms linked to them and make their peaceful resolution more difficult. Actors who feel unfairly treated are less open to compromise and reconciliation agreements. A particular problem is that actors in conflicts over justice often see their own position as morally justified, while the opposing position is motivated purely by power politics and strategy. However, if different justice claims are given equal consideration, this increases the chances of a successful negotiation.
• Dealing with conflicts over justice is important for the stability and effectiveness of institutions. Analogous to the findings of social psychology for individuals, research at PRIF shows that states are also more willing to accept distributive inequality if they judge the underlying procedures to be fair. This has important implications for the design of global governance in particular and underlines the relevance of regional institutions for the legitimization of global rules.
• Contrary to widespread assumptions in the literature regarding the greater stability of a post-war order as a result of a clear victory for one party to the conflict, peace agreements with their often hard-negotiated compromises between the parties to the conflict guarantee a peace that is at least as stable as the implementation of the concerns of just one party to the conflict.

Beyond the substantial findings, PRIF's research program has succeeded in establishing an international network for justice research, ranging from political science and philosophy to neuroscience, and has been able to set new research impulses in peace and conflict research. At the same time, the research program was thematically aligned with the Cluster of Excellence “Normative Orders”. This made it possible to intensify the research cooperation with Goethe University Frankfurt.

The core projects in the research program “Antinomies of Democratic Peace” dealt to a large extent with Western democracies and their international organizations. The research uncovered the lines of conflict that arise when Western political goals, especially value-based ones, clash with other actors, namely non-democracies and non-Western democracies. The importance of normative differences in “interest-based” policy fields was a striking finding that called for further investigation. At the same time, the Cluster of Excellence “Normative Orders” was applied for and approved, in which PRIF was involved with four Principal Investigators. In their joint work, the experts constructively examined approaches to normative liberal theory. In the process, it became clear how important conflicting normative claims, namely demands for justice, are for the resolution of conflicts. Such conflicts contain risks of violence, but also create opportunities for consensual settlements in addition to obstacles. The idea for the subsequent research program “Just Peace Governance” developed from these strands.