Aufruhr - Katastrophe - Konkurrenz - Zerfall

Revolutions, disasters and crumbling empires are challenges to social orders. Under time constraints and high measures of emotionality, people are looking for a new or an old stability. What is it that guides their search? Moods or habits from the time before the threat? The type of threat or the type of the old order? The material interests of those who are threatened? The hopes of those who up to now had been in inferior positions? The collaborative research centre 923, "Bedrohte Ordnungen" (Threatened Orders), studies societies under stress, from antiquity up to the present, in various parts of the world. It uses the insights of research on revolutions and disasters and embraces approaches from various branches of cultural studies in order to determine the "if?" and "how?" of social change. In doing so, it focuses on the spatial and the temporal patterns of social orders. After two years of research, the CRC 923 "Threatened Orders" presents central questions and first answers which are the result of an international conference.