Volume 19 of the Studies in World-Formation series marks the transition from the theoretical elaboration of the Operatoric Research Corpus to the explicit formulation of World-Formation Research as a research programme and to its first systematic application to the problem of structural responsibility. Its point of departure is the assumption of a fundamental non-closure of world. Scientific, institutional, and social orders must stabilize differences in order to know, decide, and act. Yet every stabilization also produces exclusions and alters the conditions under which further reality, alternative perspectives, and future knowledge can emerge. World-Formation Research therefore investigates not only what becomes visible and determinable through knowledge, but also how successful closures transform the conditions of further knowing. This second movement is understood not as a subsequent ethics of scientific practice, but as a component of scientific rationality itself.
The volume develops an operatoric research approach linking non-closure, Seinsverschiebung, World-Binding, Eigenzeit, Negative Morphology, Counter-Position, and Provoked Empiricism. Provoked Empiricism designates a recursive form of inquiry in which an existing world-order is confronted, through a reasoned positing, with its own normative, epistemic, or institutional claims. Reactions, defensive responses, shifts of jurisdiction, non-intervention, and attempts at closure thereby become empirical material. The purpose is not to manufacture conflict, but to make visible structures that remain difficult to observe precisely because their conditions and exclusions are stabilized as normality.
The second part applies this research logic to structural violence. The concept of structural violence made it possible to describe harms that cannot be reduced to a single act or an identifiable original perpetrator. Yet this achievement can itself produce a new epistemic blind spot: as violence becomes increasingly explained through structures, fragmented jurisdictions, institutional routines, and distributed decision-making power, concrete responsibility for its continuation can disappear. The volume describes this as the perpetrator gap and distinguishes between constitutive perpetratorlessness and produced perpetratorlessness, in which responsibility is dissolved again despite increasing knowledge and existing possibilities for intervention.
From this analysis emerges the figure of the apparently legitimated inactive witness to structural violence with decision-making power: a person who possesses sufficient knowledge of serious harm, has relevant possibilities to investigate, limit, or interrupt it, and nevertheless allows institutional normality, role-bound conduct, or jurisdictional boundaries to prevail over intervention. Responsibility is therefore treated not as a static property but as something that can become concentrated over time through increasing knowledge, foreseeability, agency, and continued non-intervention. The decisive issue is not institutional inactivity as such, but the relational convergence of serious harm, available knowledge, decision-making power, possible alternatives, and actual response.
Provoked Empiricism forms the methodological bridge between both parts of the volume. By documenting indications, opportunities for correction, institutional responses, and repeated attempts at closure, it produces a traceable history of changing epistemic conditions. A system that does not know of a harm is analytically different from one that has repeatedly been confronted with the same harm and nevertheless continues unchanged. The intervening witness does not produce perpetration; rather, the intervention alters the conditions under which responsibility can become visible, attributable, and reconstructable.
Volume 19 thus brings methodology and responsibility analysis together within a single research movement. The first part formulates the programme; the second demonstrates how that programme can reopen a successful conceptual stabilization at the point where it begins to obscure its own consequences. The central question is therefore not only which world is stabilized through knowledge, but also what becomes invisible within that stabilization and under what conditions responsibility can re-emerge. Non-closure thereby appears as an epistemic, political, and human-rights condition: the requirement that established categories remain open to revision where they cease to carry the realities they were intended to make intelligible.
Download: https://zenodo.org/records/22670280/files/Speed_2026_World-Binding-Vol_19_en.pdf?download=1
