Volker Rittberger

Volker Rittberger (born May 4, 1941 in Karlsruhe ; † November 13, 2011 in Tübingen ) was a German political scientist and professor at the University of Tübingen .

Life

Rittberger studied law and political science at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg and the University of Geneva from 1961 to 1965 . 1966/1967 he was the administrator of a scientific assistant position and lecturer at the seminar for scientific politics of the University of Freiburg.

Until 1971 Rittberger was a PhD student in political science at Stanford University in California and worked as a research assistant to Gabriel A. Almond and Robert C. North . In 1968 he was awarded the degree of Magister (MA) from Stanford University.

From 1971 he was a research assistant at the Hessian Foundation for Peace and Conflict Research (PRIF) in Frankfurt a. M. and works as a lecturer at the Institute for Political Science at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg . In 1972 he was awarded a doctorate in philosophy ( Ph. D. ) in political science.

In 1973 Rittberger was appointed to the newly established chair for political science with a focus on international relations / peace and conflict research at the University of Tübingen. He retired in 2009.

In 1975/76 he was chairman of the Peace Research Council at the German Society for Peace and Conflict Research (DGFK), and in the following year chairman of the Working Group for Peace and Conflict Research (AFK).

From 1978 to 1998 Rittberger was Senior Special Fellow of the United Nations Training and Research Institute (UNITAR) and from 1986 to 1989 member of the board of the German Society for the United Nations (DGVN); since then he has been a member of the DGVN Presidium.

In 1988 he was a member of the UN Political Advisory Council of the Federal Foreign Office .

From 1993 to 1996 Rittberger was Vice President of the International Studies Association (ISA), then until 2000 he was the coordinator of a working group within the framework of the United Nations University (UNU) project on "The United Nations System in the 21st Century".

The Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Science, Research and Art awarded Volker Rittberger with the state teaching award in 2003 at the suggestion of the University of Tübingen. The award related to the participation of student groups in the world's largest Model United Nations conference in New York, which Rittberger had supervised for several years .

Memberships

Since 2003 Rittberger has been chairman of the German Foundation for Peace Research, which was founded in 2000 and is close to the government . He was a member of the SPD .

Research priorities

Rittberger's teaching and research focus was on international peace and conflict research .

As co-editor of the anthology "European Security - Principles, Perspectives, Concept" (Vienna, 1987), he tried to create a counter-position to the one-sided emphasis on the military and armaments aspects of European security by bringing together political scientists, psychologists and economists. East-West relations were judged primarily from a military point of view; cultural, economic, political and psychological dimensions were ignored and security policy was reduced to solving armaments problems. The collective security system of Europe failed because of the arms race for mutual nuclear deterrence. As an alternative to collective security, a system of common security should be established, which was to be created as an increasingly dense system of rules of conduct for as many political fields as possible and which would have required a tight network of cooperative relationships between the opposing camps. In this discussion, Rittberger concentrated on fundamental questions of European security.

In “United Nations and World Order - Civilizing International Politics?” (Opladen, 1997), Rittberger, together with Martin Mogler and Bernhard Zangl, addressed the opportunities and risks of different models of world order and their implementation by the United Nations. The background is the revival of the UN at the end of the 1980s through the success of the US-led military action in Kuwait against Iraq and the collapse of the Soviet Union and the associated end of the East-West conflict . The work is an analysis that aims to examine the United Nations from the point of view of its contributions to the “civilization” of international relations.

Together with Bernhard Zangl, Rittberger was also the author of the textbook "International Organizations - Politics and History", which has already been published twice. (Wiesbaden, 2005) International organizations are to be analyzed as a genre with the help of social science methods. A systematic introduction to the state of theory-led research is to be given. The focus of the latest edition is the formation and development conditions of international organizations as well as their contribution to the generation and stabilization of intergovernmental cooperation in various policy fields. Theoretical insights are combined with empirical observations of politics in order to draw a coherent and coherent picture of the connection between international politics and international organizations.

Works

(with Klaus J. Gantzel, Gisela Kress): Conflict - Escalation - Crisis. Social science studies on the outbreak of the First World War , Bertelsmann Universitätsverlag, Düsseldorf 1972.

Evolution and international organization. Toward a new level of sociopolitical integration , Nijhoff, Den Haag 1973.

(with Dieter S. Lutz ): Disarmament Policy and the Basic Law. A constitutional and peace science study , Nomos, Baden-Baden 1976.

(with Manfred Efinger , Michael Zürn ): International Regime in East-West Relations. A contribution to research into the peaceful handling of international conflicts , Haag + Herchen, Frankfurt am Main 1988.

International Relations Theories. Inventory and research perspectives . West German publishing house , Opladen 1990.
(with Michael Zürn ): Research for new peace rules. Review of two decades of peace research . Academy of the Diocese of Rottenburg-Stuttgart, Stuttgart 1990.
International Regimes in East-West Politics . Pinter, London and New York 1990.
Regime Theory and International Relations . Clarendon Press, Oxford 1993.
(with Bernhard Zangl, Andreas Kruck) : International Organizations - Politics and History. European and worldwide intergovernmental associations , Leske and Budrich, Opladen 1994 (4th edition 2013).
Adaptation or exit: industrialized countries in the UNESCO crisis. A contribution to comparative foreign policy research . Sigma, Berlin 1995.
(with Andreas Hasenclever, Peter Mayer): Theories of International Regimes . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1997.
German Foreign Policy Since Unification. Theories and Case Studies . Manchester University Press, Manchester 2001.
Global Governance and the United Nations System . United Nations University Press, Tokyo, New York, Paris 2001.
Democracy-development-peace. Focus on political science in Tübingen . Nomos , Baden-Baden 2003.
(together with Andreas Kruck, Anne Romund): Basics of world politics. Theory and Empirical World Government , VS Verl. Für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2010.

Since 1985, Volker Rittberger has published the Tübingen working papers for international politics and peace research . Since 1996 he has been co-editor of the journal Die Friedens-Warte. Journal of International Organization and Peace . He was also a member of the editorial boards of Cooperation and Conflict , Global Governance and the Journal of Peace Research .

literature

Andreas Hasenclever u. a. (Ed.): Power and impotence of international institutions. Festschrift for Volker Rittberger , Campus-Verl., Frankfurt am Main 2007.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME	Rittberger, Volker
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	German political scientist
DATE OF BIRTH	May 4, 1941
PLACE OF BIRTH	Karlsruhe
DATE OF DEATH	November 13, 2011
Place of death	Tübingen