The research group, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), focuses on the rise of interface conflicts within and across overlapping spheres of authority. The increased institutional production of norms in the international realm leads to both horizontal interface conflicts at the same level of governance (e.g. across two or more international spheres of authority) and vertical interface conflicts across spheres of authority on different levels (e.g. international and national spheres of authority). Under which conditions become such conflicts manifest? What are the responses to conflicting rules originating from overlapping spheres of authority? If responses are justified with reference to normative principles, what are these principles and how are they operationalized concretely? What consequences do the different ways of responding to interface conflicts have for the global order as a whole? With these questions, the research group moves beyond the study of issue-area specific international institutions or organizations, and targets the question of the international order understood as a system of overlapping and interacting spheres of authority.
The interdisciplinary research group consists of thematic sub-projects in the fields of international relations and (international) law from Freie Universität Berlin, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (Geneva), Helmut-Schmidt-Universität (Hamburg), Hertie School of Governance (Berlin), Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, University of Potsdam, and WZB Berlin Social Science Center.
Below, you will find a brief description of the sub-projects the research group is working on.
This project is funded by the
Sub-projects
Coordination Unit (Z-Project)
Principal Investigators: Michael Zürn, WZB Berlin Social Science Center/Freie Universität Berlin and Christian Kreuder-Sonnen, WZB Berlin Social Science Center/ Friedrich Schiller University Jena
The Coordination Unit (Z-Project) will be established at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center and headed by Michael Zürn. Its main functions will be to coordinate interaction and cooperation within the research unit, to promote public and external relations activities of the unit, and to create a common knowledge depository and ensure shared theoretical and conceptual orientations. The main administrative tasks of the Z-Project will include the planning and organization of workshops and the research group’s regular colloquia, the development of a common internet presence and platform, as well as the support of the single projects in the management of financial resources. In addition, the Z-Project shall coordinate the research group’s efforts to promote young researchers, diversity, and gender equality. Substantively, the Coordination Unit will provide the necessary conceptual and data background to tackle those overarching research questions that go beyond the analytical scope of any single project. In particular, it will take up the tasks of developing an integrated concept of interface conflicts in the global order and creating a database of all those conflicts identified in the single projects in order to allow for comparative research.
Further project members: Andrés Saravia, WZB Berlin Social Science Center
Responses to Interface Conflicts: How Spheres of Authority Handle Conflicting Rules
Principal Investigators: Michael Zürn, WZB Berlin Social Science Center/Freie Universität Berlin and Benjamin Faude, WZB Berlin Social Science Center
The project RESPONSES analyzes the responses to one particular type of interface conflict, namely those between different sectoral spheres of international authority. The project’s dependent variable will be the handling of interface conflicts. It will conceive of the handling of an interface conflict as an interactive outcome emerging from the individual responses to such a conflict from different types of actors. The project aims at explaining which forms of conflict management evolve in response to horizontal interface conflicts. The question is approached from two angles. In one module, the project RESPONSES will identify sectoral interface conflicts as perceived by the secretariats of international organizations (IOs). In a second module, the project will analyze the G-summits (G7, G8, and G20) in order to probe the expectation of the literature that this site of international authority comes closest to the notion of a meta-authority in the international system, conceived as the place where interface conflicts are regularly managed. In this module, the project will identify those interface dealt with during the G7, G8, and G20 summits. Overall, the project RESPONSES aims at a) describing the forms of handling interface conflicts that emerge from the interaction between different spheres of international authority, b) explaining the conditions under which different forms of handling interface conflicts prevail, and c) assessing to which extent and where meta-authority is exercised in the global governance system.
Please find detailed dossiers for all case studies here.
Further project members: Julia Fuss, WZB Berlin Social Science Center
Management of Interface Conflicts in African Security Governance
Principal Investigator: Anna Geis, Helmut-Schmidt-University Hamburg
Security issues in global governance are shaped by different spheres of authority and the interaction between multiple political actors on different levels. Legally, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) has the supreme political authority to take decisions on the use of military force. However, overlapping memberships of states in the UN(SC) and in various regional (security) organizations enhance the potential for norm conflicts across and within several spheres of authority. One such regional organization is the African Union that was set up in 2002 as successor to the Organization of African Unity and that has established itself as a significant collective security provider. Many violent intra-state conflicts are located within the geographical sphere of the African Union and several military interventions justified with references to human rights norms take place in Africa. Today, African security governance constitutes a dense web of interactions between international, regional, sub-regional and national actors, with the African Union being the regional key actor in this web. In this configuration interface conflicts are likely to occur.
The project analyzes seven cases of military missions in Africa as settings for interface conflicts, addressing the following questions: How do key actors within the emerging African security governance architecture articulate and manage vertical interface conflicts in the context of military deployments? Which norms do these actors invoke, and how can the variety in responses to such conflicts be explained? What are the effects of different forms of conflict management?
Please find a detailed project description here.
Further project members: Louise Wiuff Moe, Helmut-Schmidt-University in Hamburg, Lena Schumacher, Helmut-Schmidt-University in Hamburg
Responding to Norm Collisions: Procedural Norms and Interface Management in Fragmented Areas of Transnational Politics
Principal Investigators: Anna Holzscheiter, Freie Universität Berlin/WZB Berlin Social Science Center and Andrea Liese, University of Potsdam
The research project asks when a norm collision becomes manifest in transnational politics and how a variety of actors (state; non-state; international organizations) respond to such a collision. Assumptions of legal pluralism and (critical) constructivist norm research are combined in the project’s theoretical framework in order to identify norms in discursive practices, to study when and in which contexts they are perceived to collide and to establish a typology of responses to such collisions. We use the methodological tools of discourse analysis, process tracing and comparative case studies.
The research project analyzes norm collisions in six policy issues in the field of human security: trafficking in persons, genetically modified organisms, drug control, organ trafficking, refugee protection, and child labor. Comparing these transnational issues, the project first aims to identify the context in which actors perceive these policy issues to present them with incompatible normative positions. In a second step, the project analyzes the procedural norms actors refer to in their responses to such perceived norm collisions. The project contributes to the overall objectives of the research group by reconstructing and analyzing responses to horizontal interface conflicts and by uncovering the normative principles underlying these responses. It will thus generate insights relevant to the research group’s inventory of principles upon which responses are based and to an empirically derived typology of responses to norm collisions.
Further project members: Sassan Gholiagha, WZB Berlin Social Science Center
Evolving Internet Interfaces: Content Control and Privacy Protection
Principal Investigator: Markus Jachtenfuchs, Hertie School of Governance
The project aims to analyze conflicts between spheres of authority in transnational internet governance. It focusses on conflicts between public and private authority as well as on conflicts between national and international/transnational spheres. In internet governance, these interface conflicts do not take place between established, solid spheres of authority but between liquid ones (Krisch). They are an essential element in the emergence and evolution of spheres of authority in a rapidly changing field which has not yet found its final shape. The project will analyze the evolution of these interface conflicts over time, the normative justifications employed and the outcomes of those conflicts. In the context of the research group, it functions as a contrast project for assessing how the analytical apparatus of the framework paper can be employed in non-typical contexts which are characterized by liquidity and a strong role of private authority.
The project has two doctoral positions on content control and on privacy protection respectively.
Further project members: Anke Obendiek, Hertie School of Governance, and Daniëlle Flonk, Hertie School of Governance
Interface Law: Legal Interactions between Spheres of Authority in Global Economic Governance
Principal Investigator: Nico Krisch, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva
The growing density of interactions between spheres of authority in global governance – the focus of the proposed research unit – puts pressure also on traditional legal structures. It challenges the traditional separation of domestic and international legal orders in favour of greater linkages and routine interaction, but it also drives strategies of distancing where greater integration had been the norm, as in the field of public international law. These dual pressures are likely to produce new configurations on both the formal and the substantive side of the interfaces between normative orders and they may drive relations between layers of law in the direction of greater enmeshment rather than formal separation or simple unity. This project seeks to analyze these new configurations both empirically and from a theoretical angle. It aims at illuminating how the interactions between (formal and informal, public and private) spheres of authority in the global order are reflected in the theory and practice of law, using the issue area of global economic governance as an example and focusing on six jurisdictions – Germany, the UK, the US, Brazil, India and China – to inquire into the ways in which conflicts between different layers of law (and informal norms) are processed in judicial, quasi-judicial and regulatory settings. The project adopts two main foci. First, it seeks to trace the character of the interface norms at play – the way they reflect conceptions of identity and difference between spheres of authority. Secondly, the project is interested in the substantive content of the interface norms – the normative expectations they contain for the relations between authority spheres – and the indications this gives for a broader account of the governing norms of global law. In a second pillar, the findings on these two dimensions will be used to advance our theoretical understanding of the postnational legal order. As the unity and closure of (national and international) legal orders is challenged as a result of greater proximity, guiding concepts of legal theory such as sources, system, and coherence are likely to come under pressure. Using historical insights as a contrast, the project seeks to work towards a theoretical account of a pluralist, yet enmeshed postnational legal order in which interfaces between different bodies of norms take a central place.
Further project members: Lucy Lu Reimers, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva and Francesco Corradini, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva
Conflict of norms – conflict of laws – conflict of systems? On the conditions of normative conflict in international law
Principal Investigator: Christoph Möllers, Faculty of Law, Humboldt-University Berlin
The project investigates how independent third-party actors construct normative conflicts in the concrete setting of international dispute resolution. The guiding intuition is that there is no necessity in understanding a certain coincidence of norms as a normative or interface conflict. Perhaps the same constellation is sometimes seen as a conflict and sometimes not. Throughout the project, a wide range of judicial and quasi-judicial decisions will be examined with a view to better understanding under which conditions a latent interface conflict in a given situation materializes into a manifest interface conflict. Put differently, the project asks: Under which conditions do third-party actors address latent interface conflicts, and what are their argumentative strategies in either solving or avoiding them? This question is approached through scrutinizing the rationale provided by various third-party actors in establishing or rejecting the existence of an interface conflict. Through this approach, the project seeks to establish a typology of possible horizontal interface conflicts in international law that accounts for its contingency, while at the same time gaining insight into argumentative strategies of third-party actors in the identification and resolution of such conflicts.
Further project members: Hannah Birkenkötter, Faculty of Law, Humboldt-University Berlin and Linda Schneider, Faculty of Law, Humboldt-University Berlin