Discourses of Weakness and Resource Regimes

In welchem Zusammenhang stehen Schwächediskurse und Ressourcenregime? Warum eröffnet gerade dieses Begriffspaar eine Perspektive auf die Handlungsfähigkeit von Akteuren sowie auf historische Veränderungsprozesse? Dieser Band widmet sich programmatisch der Frage, welchen Einfluss Schwäche- und Stärkediskurse auf den Umgang mit Ressourcen haben und wie davon ausgehend Selbstbeschreibungen Eingang in Ressourcenprozesse finden und diese prägen.

Auteur
Iwo Amelung ist Professor für Sinologie an der Universität Frankfurt am Main. Hartmut Leppin ist Professor für Alte Geschichte an der Universität Frankfurt am Main. Christian A. Müller ist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am SFB 1095 an der Universität Frankfurt am Main.

Échantillon de lecture
A Word from the Editors The acquisition and distribution of resources is one of the central challenges of our times. Survival, as well as the seizing of development opportunities, compels actors-be they states, groups or individuals-to use resources to achieve their objectives. The continuous inequality (and what economists frequently refer to as scarcity) in the distribution of resources throughout history, is also the cause for numerous individual, social and international conflicts. This constitutes a challenge for academic research: how do actors refer to their situation in terms of their usage of resources? How do they talk about their deficiencies? This very connection is the starting point for the present series Discourses of Weakness and Resource Regimes. Discourses that deal with weakness are a phenomenon that can be observed in all societies at all times. Frequently, those discourses are directly connected to the question of agency and the required resources. Employing a humanities perspective, the series examines the problem of how discourses of weakness influence the deployment and usage of resources. It delves into the question of how actors' self-description and self-assessment impact on and shape the handling and usage of resources. The English and German texts in this series combine contributions from historians, cultural studies specialists and philosophers on the multi-faceted changes of resource processes encompassing the evaluation, acquisition and handling of resources. It seeks to avoid a narrow understanding of resources, and, for instance, a conceptual bifurcation between natural and immaterial resources, and hopes to find robust and resilient alternatives to such distinctions. It is expected that the research results will help to further develop existing concepts of transformation and thus contribute to expanding approaches of modelling substantial historical change. The series presents the research results of the Frankfurt Collaborative Research Center 1095 Discourses of Weakness and Resource Regimes, which sought to find and evaluate new approaches to the problem of resources. Introduction Iwo Amelung, Hartmut Leppin, and Christian A. Müller I. Towards the Interdependence of Self-placements and Self-efficacy The acquisition and distribution of resources is one of the central challenges of our times. Survival, as well as the seizing of development opportunities, compels actors-be they states, groups or individuals-both to use and to exploit resources in order to achieve their objectives. The continuous inequality (and, what economists prominently refer to as, scarcity) in the distribution of resources throughout history is also the cause for numerous individual, social and international conflicts. This constitutes a challenge for academic research: How do actors refer to the situation in which they find themselves in terms of their usage of resources? How do they talk about their deficiencies in resources? Beyond such phenomena of self-perception, the dimensions of practice and the conditions for action are also of interest: Which factors influence the agency of an actor, and how are these factors shaped? How-to sum up-can such a multi-layered phenomenon as the configuration of capacity to act be described? Currently, different disciplines offer different answers: production factors (as in economics ), resilience (as in psychology ), or majorities (as in political science ). Historical science stresses the contingency of the capacity to act, meaning the dependency on historically, culturally and geographically variable factors. The ability to act is always "socio-culturally" mediated, so it is not something that was available to the actors at all times, but was shaped differently at different times, and thus needs an explanation of its diverse occurrences. To register phenomena of this kind, analytical boundaries need to be set up: if we assume that the configuration of the capacity to act has always had a practical and discursive dimension, then this perspective will be unfolded at the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 1095 via two concepts: on the practical side, we assume that resources are crucial. There is little doubt about the high relevance of resources in many disciplines. However, resources only indicate the potential of acting; they establish the possibility for actors to do or not do something. They are a necessary, but by no means satisfactory, explanation for the accomplishments of goals. For the question of the capacity to act, additional factors are of importance in which the self-placement and positioning of actors also come into play. These self-placements can vary greatly both in their general direction and in their intended direction of impact. Moreover, they are of special importance when they are about weakness because they then demand change. This opens up a wide field of research because weakness has been addressed in very different ways and in the light of several motives and agendas. Furthermore weakness always refers to their effects, which can be usefully illustrated through discourses about the downfall of Europe or the weakness of Chinese state at the turn of the twentieth century. In both cases, the problematisation of the situations in question changed the action of the actors, but in completely different, and sometimes unexpected, ways. The Europeans often described themselves as weak, despite their relatively strong position, whereas the Chinese, who perceived as deficient what was, in fact, to become the starting-point of an immense global power in the twenty-first century. We will model such complex self-placements, as well as their effects and consequences, as discourses of weakness. Clearly, they do not have to be directly about resources and can contain disparate diagnoses and inventories. But-and this is the crucial feature-they do have a general link to the dimension of activeness. While the realisation of strength is an invitation to continue on existing paths, diagnoses of weakness create-sometimes acute-pressure for change. This initial dynamic of change is important because it indicates situations in which actors examine and, if necessary, correct their positions, and-as a consequence-their concomitant use of resources. Yet, knowledge about the correlation between self-placements and the handling of resources is fairly scarce, which is why the CRC 1095 wants to explore this perspective. From a natural sciences and economic perspective, but also in architecture or city-planning, it is both usual and obvious to think about resources. Practical problems of acquisition and processing prevail, while discursive examinations about weaknesses and strengths play a lesser role. In the face, for example, of a looming scarcity of water-one could pointedly say-that it is worthless to know what "opinions" exists about water. But many developments in history and in the world of today show that resources cannot be separated from positioning and deliberation. The close relationship between weakness and resource is even present on an encyclopedic level: The Oxford dictionary defines resources as "means of suppl…