The project examines the papacy in the 14^th century as a contested institution. Observing the Avignon papacy, contemporaries began to ponder whether papal rule could and should not look very different. In doing so, they placed it in a horizon of possibilities defined by the factual actions of the popes, cardinals and members of the curia, as well as existing alternatives for action. Therefore, the practices of papal rule could be observed as contingent. As a result, the papacy saw itself challenged, not as an institution, but in its actions. Presenting itself as an institution that made consensus possible and that enabled compromises to be made was a strategy for reacting to this challenge and legitimising papal rule.

The project analyses the use of compromise in legal settlements (naisai) for mitigating resource conflicts in Japan during the Edo period (1603–1868). By comparing resource conflicts from the three areas that were governed as commons (mountains, rivers and channels, lakes and coastal waters), the entanglements between resources, social structures and legal practices are revealed.

In economic game theory, which goes back to John von Neumann (1903-1957), Oskar Morgenstern (1902-1977) and John F. Nash (1928-2015), among others, “cooperation” and “defection” are the dominant terms and decisive categories. Under what conditions do private actors cooperate in or defect from the provision of public goods? How can those involved in the use of common-pool resources cooperate in such a way that the shared resource is not overexploited or even destroyed? While economic game theory, for the sake of simplicity, often models social conflict situations as a game with only two alternative courses of action (i.e. cooperation or defection), in real (economic) life it can be observed that the “players” often make compromises. In game theory literature, the term “compromise” is not or only very rarely explicitly mentioned. This research project therefore investigates in more detail in which “games” and negotiation/conflict situations, which are dealt with in the economics literature, compromises play a role.

This research project explores what sorts of institutional reforms and innovations could help democracies overcome the democratic deficits that characterise the current populist moment. These deficits include, in particular, the unequal responsiveness of political decisions, the widespread feeling of being left behind and tendencies towards (affective) polarisation, which complicate practices of compromise. The hypothesis of the project is that what is needed are novel forms of institutional reforms and innovations that take seriously the social, cultural and economic causes of conflicts, and do not just complement the existing institutional settings but reconfigure them. Possible contours of such novel institutional reforms and innovations are drawn from a bottom-up perspective, which exploits the creative potential of real world practices to develop perspectives for institutional change.

This research project explores the question of how people spent their leisure time in the 20^th century. While labour history is a long-established research topic, historical aspects of leisure time have been largely neglected. The project addresses this research gap and examines historical developments on the basis of activities such as gardening, clubs and societies, or private collecting passions. The specific focus is on individual motivations, accessibility as well as the specific prerequisites for the chosen activities.

Thesis supervisors: Prof. Dr Ute Schneider / Prof. Dr Rolf Parr

The 'Camp David' event is analysed from the perspective of a historical-semantic investigation of the term and concept of 'compromise'. As the negotiations - most of which took place behind closed doors - are not directly accessible, the master's thesis is based on reports in German and English print media as the corpus of material to be analysed. This research design necessitates a twofold theoretical and methodological approach: On the one hand, the existing research on the concept of 'compromise' is analysed, i.e. research on a subject that tends to be understood as interactionist face-to-face communication. On the other hand, selected print media are analysed in terms of content in the tradition of research into historical semantics and, in some cases, discourse analysis. This combination of approaches makes it possible to focus on different objects in each case, with 'compromise' on the one hand and 'print media analysis of compromises' on the other hand.

Thesis supervisors: Prof. Dr Rolf Parr / PD Dr Thomas Küpper

On the one hand, this master's thesis uses a specific event in the field of politics, namely the formation of a coalition, to investigate the need for compromise and, on the other hand, the way in which this is reported in the print media (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Die Zeit). Rather than applying pre-established and thus always normative definitions of 'compromise' to the researched event and material, the actual use of the term 'compromise' in reporting on the political event of the 2021 federal election and the subsequent coalition formation will be investigated. This provides an interesting opportunity for compromise research to compare circulating definitions and the actual use of the term 'compromise'. A concrete example is used to show the enormous importance of compromise in the political culture of the Federal Republic of Germany.

BA Thesis supervised by Prof. Dr Ute Schneider / Prof. Dr Jens Gurr

When considering compromise today, it is often indispensable to look at the history of the theoretical examination of this concept. A contribution to the historical exploration of the concept of compromise is made with the thesis "Compromise in the Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay. Narratives of Conflict Regulation in British Historiography in the First Half of the 19^th Century".

In historical research on compromise, the work "On Compromise" (1877) by the British politician John Morley has so far been regarded as the first theoretical examination of the concept of compromise. Statements by the British politician and historian Thomas Macaulay (1800-1859) are occasionally cited as marginal notes without further consideration. The thesis examines Macaulay's hitherto neglected understanding of compromise, paying particular attention to the narration of compromise as a means of regulating conflicts.