Conditions for successful governance in tension between humanitarian concerns and sovereignty rights

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Harald Müller; Dr. Simone Wisotzki
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: from 2014 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 251585474

The project examines the role of justice claims as condition for successful governance of efforts to curb forms of violence. It draws on constructivist norm research in International Relations which stresses the contestation of norms. The project takes up a desideratum of global governance research by focusing on the role of justice claims in global governance efforts. In doing so, it incorporates insights of the debates on Ethics in International Relations as well as on global justice in International Political Theory (IPT). It is the aim of the project to contrast these theoretical debates, which have a strong normative bias, with empirical research and to identify negotiation strategies for the political practice. Special emphasis is placed on the relevance of states converging and diverging notions of justice in the development and implementation of global governance approaches in the United Nations framework. The question here is whether different notions of justice lead to conflicts between states and ultimately affect the global governance efforts at different stages of their life-cycle. In the various negotiation processes at the UN, collisions of justice claims can be identified which related either to enhanced individual rights, such as human rights or human security, or to statist sovereignty claims such as nonintervention or territorial integrity. In order to contribute to the empirical research on justice we select successful and failed global governance efforts in three relevant policy areas: humanitarian intervention, humanitarian arms control and womens human rights.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants