Editors: Marc Grimm, Ullrich Bauer and Baris Ertugrul

Abstract Submissions: 01.10.2017

The concept of crises is currently in vogue. There is a broad discussion about the impact of crisis that is often associated with effects of social disintegration but the concept of crisis is even broader. Various social areas such as ecology, economics, and migration are considered as being crisis-ridden. There is also a gender crisis. And the EU, which suffers from a lack of political trust, finds itself in a state of crisis like never before. As such, crisis obviously describes strongly divergent phenomena, from the collapse of the gross domestic product to the loss of political trust.

Crisis has become something like a diagnosis of an era, in which development differences and empirical differences are overlooked – despite or precisely because the crisis diagnosis has become an instrument for political purposes. A close examination of the different approaches to crisis research draws the conclusion that a differentiated perspective is rarely taken; most research treats crisis as a given fact without further theoretical explanation. Read more … (Web)