The PhD project aims to identify which factors can contribute to a strengthening of regional democracy development from a social work perspective.

To this end, a historical analysis of youth social work in the Cottbus area and southern Brandenburg in the 1990s will be developed. Particular attention is paid to the AgAG (Action Program against Aggression and Violence), which as a federal program from 1992 - 1996 for the prevention of violence among young people in the then new federal states was always implicitly linked to the prevention of right-wing extremism (e.g. Rommelspacher et. al. 2003: 56 // Burschel et. al 2013 // Mathis Blome; Barbara Manthe 2014: 4). The projects in the AgAG were centrally focused on youth social work and youth work because, in addition to the prevention aspect, the establishment and expansion of youth welfare structures in the regions was also central. (Bohn et. al. 1997: 11) Thus, the AgAG can be located at the interface of social work and democracy promotion. However, the experiences of the AgAG - apart from the program-accompanying evaluation and some partial projects - have not yet been systematically analyzed. At the same time, the knowledge of that time can be an important resource for today's challenges of social work in dealing with right-wing extremism.

In the dissertation project, this very knowledge of actors from social work, urban society - here in particular anti-fascist activists - and local politics at the time is collected by means of narrative interviews and evaluated using the methodology of the documentary method (Nohl 2017).

This is done from today's perspective without, however, ignoring the specifics of the historical contexts. The interpretation of the entire material takes place with recourse to the current findings of critical right-wing extremism research, attitude research, critical transformation research in relation to the system change in 1990, and gender-reflective and discrimination-sensitive social work.

Although the survey focuses on the area of South Brandenburg, it is designed so that the results can claim validity beyond. They are intended to contribute to the development of social work theory and to provide a basis for the development of new methods and concepts for strengthening democracy in the practice of social work and youth work.

Processor: Stefanie Lindner