No. 112/2021

26 HUMBOLDT KOSMOS 112/2021 CLOSE UP ON RESEARCH she says. Part time did no harm to the quality of her work, but definitely did to her chances of getting on in academia. “The fact I only worked part time and my job was com- pletely financed by third-party funding meant that I never got a permanent position,” Hoeffler explains. “When I tried to get a full-time job, many HR departments and colleagues just couldn’t understand.” In this respect, the Humboldt Professorship that is scheduled to last five years and culmi- nate in a permanent position means a previously unknown degree of long-term planning security. But, despite that, she doesn’t have a recipe for increas- ing the number of women in top research, says Hoeffler. In her personal opinion, funding that is based solely on gender is suspect anyway. Instead, she wants to see much broader scope for diversity in the research sector. “There are many other factors apart from gender that can determine whether someone is successful or not,” she says. A young man from a deprived area who is the first in his family to go to uni- versity could de facto find it more difficult than a woman like herself with an academic family background. Unfor- tunately, she criticises, diversity is still largely cosmetic at present. “We have to find new, inclusive ways of conveying knowledge – including the sort that discovers connections instead of just plumbing the depths. And we then have to test this knowledge differently.” Hoeffler’s own research field has expanded significantly in recent years, but she has remained true to the topic of violence. In 2015, however, whilst conducting research on behalf of the United Nations for the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, she made a crucial discovery: it is not wars and civil wars that claim the most lives worldwide; vastly more people experience and suffer everyday violence. But neither policymakers nor civil societies consider what impact these supposedly individual cases and costs have on society as a whole. VIOLENCE WITHIN PEOPLE’S OWN FOUR WALLS IS OFTEN OVERLOOKED “If you just keep looking at civil wars, you forget that most of the countries in the world are peaceful,” says Hoeffler. “What we also forget is the full extent of murder, man- slaughter and domestic violence, which all have terrible consequences in peaceful countries, too.” Domestic vio- lence, in particular, affects women and children dispropor- tionately. Twelve percent of women worldwide experience violence from their intimate partners. And, as Hoeffler discovered in her studies published in 2017, 311 million children are the victims of severe corporal punishment. That is 17.5 percent of children worldwide. The poorer the people, the higher the level of violence, her data analy- sis reveals. She has set herself the goal of calculating the costs resulting from everyday violence and interpersonal violence. She also wants to collaborate across disciplines with other researchers to elaborate solutions to eliminate the causes of this hidden violence. Anke Hoeffler had planned the 2020 summer semester of her Humboldt Professorship at the University of Kon- stanz in minute detail. She was set to become the hub of a new Centre for Conflict Research and Development Pol- icy, financed with the help of the award amount. But then came COVID-19 and put a stop to all that. “The opportu- nity to do my own field work in a whole raft of countries like Haiti, Ghana and Kenya was the great gift I was given by the Humboldt Foundation”, says Hoeffler. But, at present, global travel restrictions have put an end to these studies. Necessity is famously the mother of invention, so Hoeffler quickly turned her attention to investigating the DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, IN PARTICULAR, AFFECTS WOMEN AND CHILDREN DISPROPORTIONATELY.” “