Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

Research project presents ways of overcoming future immigration challenges

The European Commission is currently negotiating with Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Mauritania to ensure that refugees do not even reach Europe's external borders - a current example of how the EU is outsourcing its responsibility for migration to third countries. Cooperation like this is increasingly taking place on an informal level. In an interview, legal scholar Luc Leboeuf from the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology talks about the risks, but also the opportunities that such agreements bring with them.

The yearbook of the Max Planck Society collects the greatest science from last year

How do moral and ethical convictions affect local economies and impact global capitalism? This is the fundamental question driving the projects of the new Max Planck Cambridge Centre for Ethics, Economy and Social Change.

Terrorist attacks, such as the shootings and bombings across Paris in November 2015 leave us with fear and loathing, but above all, with incomprehension. We cannot understand what motivates people to indiscriminately kill others; and most often, we don’t want to understand. Our author, however, argues that we should endeavour to understand terrorists – he believes this is the only way we can tackle the causes of violence.

The day-to-day life of the Wodaabe, a traditionally nomadic population group in Niger, has never involved staying in one place for long. But since the 1980s, an increasing number of them have begun to settle in cities to work. Florian Köhler, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, has observed the effects this has had on the lives of the Wodaabe.

In Germany’s diverse society, law and order are not just overseen by the police and the courts. There are communities that have their own means of settling disputes: family clans with foreign roots, for instance, but also motorcycle gangs and so-called Reichsbürger (Reich citizens), who turn their back on the modern German state and long for a return of the days of empire. Hatem Elliesie of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle and Clara Rigoni of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security, and Law are studying this phenomenon.

Terrorism awakens fear and anxiety. We feel particularly helpless because the perpetrators‘ actions seem so incomprehensible. But there is actually a certain logic behind the actions of terrorist groups. Carolin Görzig and her group at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle have set themselves the task of discovering the rules by which terrorists act. Their findings are shedding more light on the enigma of terrorist plots.

30 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, the separation between Eastern and Western Germany is still not over. Quite the contrary: when it comes to political issues in particular, the differences between the formerly socialist East and the now as then capitalist West seem to have increased in recent times. Chris Hann and his students at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle are exploring the reasons for this development in their fieldwork in Hungary and Eastern Germany.

Max Planck scientists cooperate with partners in more than 110 countries worldwide. Here they relate their personal experiences and impressions. Lale Yalçın-Heckmann, who works at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, is studying values and moral ideas surrounding commercial transactions – taking traditional rose farming in Turkey as an example.

The refugee crisis, the environmental crisis, the coronavirus crisis – in recent years Europe has found itself in the thrall of transformation processes that are creating enormous rifts within society. But what are the socio-cultural roots that nourish such fragmentation? Why are more and more people choosing to identify with political ideologies that threaten the very foundations of liberal value systems? The research group “Alpine Histories of Global Change” examines these questions as they investigate the origins of ideas of belonging and alienation.

China’s minorities policy draws no distinction between tiny groups that can be exoticized through folklore and peoples such as Tibetans, Mongols and Uyghurs with long civilizational histories. The condition of the Uyghurs improved in the 1980s, but deteriorated rapidly thereafter. The ”freedoms” of socialist market economy have rendered minority citizens second-class and put them under extreme pressure to assimilate. We document these macro-level developments on the basis of rural field research in the oasis of Qumul/Hami between 2006 and 2013.

More and more people are becoming unhoused and dependent on state support. My research addresses the need to include basic human rights in the development of a tailor-made aid system. Ethnographic research with those affected shows that fundamental rights to privacy and intimacy are linked to tenancy-protected housing and can therefore not be fully enjoyed by people without such housing. This knowledge about the life of unhoused people can be used to ensure respect for fundamental rights and to enhance the effectiveness of the aid system.

Researching learning processes of terrorist groups, we have discovered a logic of deradicalization: groups do not change their objectives but question the means and norms that define those objectives. However, when terrorist groups deradicalize, more radical factions splinter off. Such radicalization, in turn, leads to the radicalization of countermeasures by states. The learning processes of terrorist groups illuminate the logic of (de-)radicalization mechanisms and can be used to break co-radicalization patterns between states and non-state actors.

The relationships between groups of human beings and the land they occupy have become more heterogeneous and complex than ever. The department “Integration and Conflict” at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology studies the logic of collective identification and group formation and the different forms of possessiveness found in these relationships. The key example is taken from the south of Ethiopia, where agro-pastoralists find their land to be taken over by large-scale sugar cane production in the hands of investors from other parts of the country and international investors.