Author Archives: drliste

Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Global Cooperation Research

Duisburg1st Annual Conference

Date: 9th – 10th April 2019

Venue: Gerhard-Mercator-Haus, Lotharstraße 57, 47057 Duisburg

At this conference, the Centre would like to open a dialogue with other projects and agendas at the University Duisburg-Essen and partner institutions which address related topics from different perspectives and might therefore enrich, challenge or re-contextualize our research. These may include historical and contemporary processes of transnationalization, conflicts about global norms and values, global economic and social inequality, institution-building in the Global South, and the rise of regionalism, as well as tensions in specific fields of global governance, such as international migration, transnational labour markets, global health, trade, development cooperation or implications of digitalization.

I will give a talk on my transnational law of tax avoidance project.

For the full program, click here.

Workshop: Norms Between Normality and Normativity

The fourth Workshop of the DVPW subdivision IR Norms Research titled  “Norms Between Normality and Normativity” will take place on 11 and 12 October at the University of Hamburg. The workshop benefits from funding by the Centre for Globalisation and Governance (CGG) and is organized by:

  • Frank Gadinger (Käte Hamburger Kolleg / Centre for Global Cooperation Research, University of Duisburg-Essen),
  • Sassan Gholiagha (WZB, Berlin),
  • Maren Hous (University of Hamburg),
  • Philip Liste (Käte Hamburger Kolleg / Centre for Global Cooperation Research) and
  • Jan Wilkens (University of Hamburg)

For more information, click here.

Fellowship at Käte Hamburger Kolleg, Duisburg

Since October 2018, I am Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg / Centre for Global Cooperation Research at Duisburg, Germany. I am working on the project on “The Dark Sides of Transnational Cooperation: How Power is at Work in Polycentric Law”.

Abstract: In various fields like environment, trade, or finance, transnational legal regulation is a polycentric process, a global struggle for law, during which heterogeneous socie-tal expectations are transformed into legal norms. At the same time, such practice may consist in regulatory capture and/or the production of regulatory gaps. While actors cooperate to achieve certain forms of regulation, the conditions of future co-operation among a global multiplicity of actors are also affected through transna-tional regulatory arrangements. Global cooperation is thus no longer innocent.

As the recently leaked “Paradise Papers” have revealed, global cooperation is structured and enabled by a complex arrangement of regulatory fragments and regulatory gaps. Instead of the morality of legal—i.e. legalized—tax avoidance, the more important question is how the complex webs of national and international regulation (or “de-regulation”) have come into being and how they set the condi-tions of the addressed transnational business practice. The widely addressed moral problems of tax avoidance demonstrate that we may not want to welcome (global) cooperation in every respect. A “cosmopolitanism of the few” (David Kennedy) or even forms of “international aristocracy” (Philip Allott) do build upon and entail inter- or transnational cooperation. Complex forms of transgovernmental “network gov-ernance” (Anne-Marie Slaughter) “global administrative law” (NYU) or “new consti-tutionalism” (Stephen Gill and Claire Cutler) do not necessarily operate to the bene-fit of all. Borrowing from critical legal theory, the project seeks to scrutinize the transnational nexus of law and cooperation. It will ask:

  • How does transnational legal regulation structure societal relations of power both across and within nation-state borders?
  • How do networking actors cooperate to “capture” national and international regulation?
  • How are complex regulatory fragments and regulatory gaps connected? How is global cooperation affected by this nexus?