PRIF Review2025

Anyone who has read our editorials from previous years knows how important our early-career researchers’ work is to us. We are quite proud of the significant contributions that our doctoral students and postdocs make to PRIF’s basic research. Last year, their dedication was recognized externally when they received several major scientific awards. Hendrik Simon was awarded the Helmuth James von Moltke Prize for his doctoral thesis. Linda Schlegel received the Hessian Doctoral Prize for Democracy Research, which was awarded for the first time. We are delighted for them both regarding these awards—but don't tell anyone until the 2026 annual review: our colleagues from the RadiGaMe project just won the Special Jury Prize of the German Computer Game Award, an honor that extends far beyond the realm of science.

The awards recognize excellence in research and knowledge transfer. They also highlight the importance of the topics addressed. The year 2025 was also marked by ongoing armed conflicts and major humanitarian crises. In the 2025 Peace Report, we emphasized the importance of highlighting seemingly forgotten wars, such as the conflict in Sudan, which we examined in a focus chapter. It is also important not to overlook the significance of civilian crisis prevention for the “Zeitenwende”, thus the topic has been, and remains, a key priority for the Institute. However, certain restructuring efforts within the Federal Foreign Office fuel fears that successful models and flagship initiatives of German foreign policy are being sacrificed to a short-sighted logic that reduces security to a purely military dimension. Self-sustaining peace requires both military defense capabilities and conflict analysis, strategic foresight, and dialogue.

Promising projects have been launched in this area at PRIF 2025. In collaboration with the Department of Computer Science at TU Darmstadt, we are developing AI-based approaches to crisis prevention and strategic foresight for future use in our policy advisory work. Building on the successes of the CNTR project over the past two years, we are further deepening interdisciplinarity within technology- and science-based peace and conflict research.

The past year was groundbreaking for PRIF in more ways than one. We recruited Prof. Tobias Ide, one of the most internationally recognized researchers in the field of climate change and security, as the new head of the Transnational Politics Research Department. Dr. Xinyu Yuan joined us from Geneva and now leads the United Nations Peacekeeping and Conflict Management Research Group. We are pleased to have filled these positions in a growing, traditional research field at the Institute with such outstanding scholars.

As the first funding phase was coming to an end, one pressing question was what would happen to the networks in peace and conflict research funded by the BMFTR. PRIF is involved in four of these networks and coordinates one of them: the TraCe Research Center — Transformations of Political Violence. Ultimately, all projects were successfully extended, including the Network on Norms against Chemical and Biological Weapons (CBWNet), the Network on Nuclear Weapons Verification (VesPoTec), and the Network on Practices of Non-Military Intervention in Africa (ANCIP). These successes demonstrate PRIF’s central contribution to German peace and conflict research in terms of both basic research and the necessary social and organizational infrastructure.

Nor have we been idle within the Leibniz Association. After all, we are involved in three Leibniz Labs, a research alliance, and three research networks, one of which we coordinate. However, based on our research on interdependence, de-risking, national security strategy, and research security, we felt that something was missing—something for which the Leibniz community seemed tailor-made: a research network on China. We applied to establish one and were surprised by the amount of interest it received from other institutes across all sections. As early as this fall, the Leibniz Presidium approved the establishment of the Leibniz Research Network China, which we will coordinate.

There is so much more that could be mentioned: a successful annual conference on coming to terms with the colonial past; a groundbreaking conference on the transfer of democracy research in Hesse; the fantastic Hessian Peace Prize awarded to Colombian activist Jani Silva; the move to a new building, marked by a grand celebration; and the Leibniz evaluation, scheduled for late 2026, which cast its shadow as early as 2025. However, there simply isn’t enough space here to cover it all. That’s why we have this annual review. We hope you enjoy reading it and gain new insights.