Institute

The Duisburg Institute for Linguistics and Social Science (Duisburger Institut für Sprach- und Sozialforschung, DISS) has been working in the field of exclusion processes in society for more than 15 years. Its work aims at grasping social problems, analysing their sources and effects. Analyses of media politics and every-day discourse are published regularly in a special edition. DISS also distributes a magazine on selected controversial issues of every-day political life twice a year complementing two annual workshops. Its extensive archive on politics, history and right-wing extremism provides information for scientists, students and journalists working in the field of anti-discrimination.

Heidelberg Institute for International Conflict Research (HIIK) at the Department of Political Science at the University of Heidelberg

The HIIK is a registered charitable organization which devotes its work to research, documentation and analysis of national and international conflicts. The HIIK was founded in 1991 to continue the work of the research project entitled "Conflicts since 1945" headed by Prof. Dr. Frank R. Pfetsch at the Department of Political Science at the University of Heidelberg.

The HIIK publishes a report called Conflict Barometer every December. This report describes the recent trends in global conflicts. It is divided into five world regions and shows all the current conflicts in detailed tables combined with short descriptive text elements. In addition it includes global trends in the conflict behaviour of the different states, as well as the measures that were taken for conflict resolution in the respective year. Coups d'état, attempted coups d'état, acts of international terrorism as well as new measures of conflict resolution are also recorded.

In their Cosimo database, the HIIK records information about the political conflicts that have taken place since 1945. Since 2003, a relational database system has been in use that has revised, updated and expanded the entire set of data of the 1.3 version of the Cosimo conflict database. Today, Cosimo 2.0 contains information about more than 500 conflicts with more than 2,500 instances that have complicated their resolution. The new version enables a delineation of the detailed conflict development in its violent and non-violent phases with the help of the systematic recording of the individual phases of fighting. Furthermore, the database includes extensive details about the structure of governmental and non-governmental participants in the conflict recorded by years.

The HIIK creates regional and global abstracts, counts, and analyses from the Cosimo data base for journalists, researchers, institutes, public institutions, and everyone who is interested in conflict management.

The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research e. V. (PIK) works on issues of climate change, climate impacts and sustainable development. It was founded in 1992 and today employs around 140 staff. At PIK, researchers from the natural sciences and the humanities work together to investigate global environmental changes and their ecological, economic and social consequences.