Author Archives: drliste

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?

International Workshop: Norms, Practice, Normativity (Hamburg)

In the context of a project funded by the Landesforschungsförderung (funding by the state of Hamburg) the Chair of Political Science, especially Global Governance has organized a workshop on the topic of “Norms, Practice, Normativity: Towards a New International Relations Theory.” The workshop took place from November 16-18 at the Centre for Globalisation and Governance. The focus was on the increasingly contestatory international practice in a world that has arguably come out of joint. To this end, participants mainly representing two recent strands of theory in the field of International Relations – critical norms research and international practice theory – discussed about the nexus between normativity and practice, that is, the ongoing contestation of norms and normativity in the course of everyday international practice. As part of the workshop, two keynote speeches were held by Mervyn Frost (King’s College London) and Antje Wiener (Universität Hamburg). Further participants were Jonathan Austin, Jonas Hagmann, Jonathan Havercroft, Maren Hofius, Friedrich Kratochwil, Xymena Kurowska, Anna Leander, Silviya Lechner, Philip Liste, Peter Niesen, Vincent Pouliot, and Jan Wilkens. A publication of the workshop contributions is planned. Moreover, the project serves the end of establishing an international network of scholars to cooperate in a future collaborative research initiative.