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About us

FIV - The German Information Network for International Relations and Area Studies is a collaborative initiative established to run the World Affairs Online database (WAO). It receives funding from the German government.

The German Information Network for International Relations and Area Studies is a collaboration between the libraries and documentation departments of ten German research organisations, coordinated by the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP), German Institute for International and Security Affairs. All member institutes are largely publicly financed and active in the fields of international relations, foreign and security policy or area studies.

Our collaboration is based on

  • sharing the work of evaluating and supplying scholarly literature
  • joint use of a central database for retrieval and indexing
  • collective development and maintenance of resources such as the multilingual European Thesaurus on International Relations and Area Studies, which evolved out of a European cooperation initiative
  • flexible use of the database for the network and its individual members

Our purpose is

  • to provide evidence-based information services for the German federal government, parliament and ministries
  • to provide high-quality, comprehensive bibliographic services for the member institutes
  • to maintain a publicly accessible bibliographic database