Peter Itzen

Peter has studied history and public law at the universities of Bonn, Freiburg and Glasgow. He received his Magister degree in 2002 with a study on Oliver Cromwell’s conception of rule during the English Commonwealth and Protectorate in the 17th century. From 2002 to 2005 he worked as a journalist with the “Ostsee-Zeitung” in Rostock and Wismar. From 2006 to 2010 he has been engaged in a PhD-project on the history of the politics of the Church of England from 1945-1990. This research had been financed by scholarships by the Evangelisches Studienwerk e.V. and the German Historical Institute. From 2010 on, he has been employed as lecturer at the Department of History at Frei- burg University.

With the recent multiplication of Western military interventions, accidents during operations have raised awareness for the military’s vulnerability by non-combat events. Our historical research project proposes to shed light on accidents in the military as a continuous yet variable problem. By looking at the military – in peacetime and wartime - as one of the most relevant social institutions of the 20th century we put the history of accidents into a wider perspective. This joint project FRIAS-USIAS will study a specific social sphere, in which all kinds of accidents take place: the military. Focusing on France and Germany in the crucial period from 1920 to 1970, we ask whether an entangled history provides a better explanatory framework for risk assessment than, for example, do the nation-state or an abstract vision.