The Collaborative Research Centre “Dynamics of Security” (SFB/TRR 138) and the Anthropology of Peace, Conflict, and Security (APeCS) network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) are organizing the joint, interdisciplinary conference.
We seem to be living in a time of crises that overlap and exacerbate each other, steering the world toward the brink of destruction. Multiplying armed conflicts, the consequences of climate change and fears of nuclear destruction, the rise of far-right ideologies and governments, economic turmoil, all these are vividly debated and give rise to a broadly shared sense that ours is an age of existential crisis. But contemporary situations of turmoil have long been on the make, and existential crises have been ongoing in many regions of the world. Thus, there is a historicity to current developments that is easy to overlook, and there are experiential registers that do not always find their way into dominant depictions of existential crisis.