The Forschungsschwerpunkt Konflikt- und Kooperationsstrukturen in Osteuropa (FKKS) - Research Group Conflict and Cooperation Structures in Eastern Europe - was founded on 18th May 1992 at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am Main. Since October 1993 it has been jointly located at the Mannheimer Zentrum für Europäische Sozialforschung (MZES) and the Chair of Political Science and Contemporary History.

 

The FKKS is concerned with issues of political and social transformation in Eastern European and post-Soviet states since the collapse of communist party rule. By the use of selected case studies and their systematic comparison the FKKS concentrates on the emergence of conflicts and their escalation into violence and war, as well as on examples of peaceful conflict regulation which led to the development of cooperative structures between social and national groupings whitin and among the states in the eastern region of the OSCE.

 

The research undertaken by the FKKS focuses particularily on those conflict and cooperation structures in individual Eastern and East Central European states which could lead to international entaglements. Conflict and cooperation in Eastern and East Central Europe are studied primarily in four policy areas:

• Nationality policy of individual States and in comparative perspective
• Foreign and security policy of individual states as well as in the context of the competing integration frameworks represented by Brussels and Moscow
• State and socioeconomic stabilization policies in conjunction whith nation- and state-building processes
• Enviromental and energy policy in conjunction whith nation- and state-building processes and with internal cooperation

The FKKS draws on many years of experience in researching Eastern Europe. Numerous research projects have been and/or are currently being sponsored by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the VolkswagenStiftung and other organizations. In the past years a group of young researchers has been trained which are working on political and societal developements in the Soviet Union and its successor states as well as in East Central Europe.

Extensive library resources have been acquired for FKKS research purposes: books, journals, newspapers, statistical data, goverment and other documents primarily in the German, English, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarussian, Slovak and Czech languages. In total the libaries contain aproximatley 4000 works in East European languages and about 200 periodicals from East and Central Europe.

The FKKS maintains an active relationship with other German research institutes concerned with Eastern Europe.