Additional Graduate Programs and Research Training Groups
Overview
Changing modes of civil society from a German-Japan comparative perspective
Project Directors: Prof Gesine Foljanty-Jost, Prof Manfred Hettling
International Research Training Group Halle - Tôkyô, Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg
2007 - 2015
The central question pursued by the proposed PhD program is how diverse respectively similar structures and operating patterns of civic society have emerged, and developed, in Germany and Japan. After the fundamental change marked by the year 1945 civic society evolved in both countries as a mode of social practice. Yet, in both cases the development of civic society is based on different historical and socio-cultural traditions which lead to different shapes of civic society.
Comparing Germany and Japan is not only of high interest because of the similarities which evolved in both countries at the same time and because of the differences in establishing and developing „civic society“ in the aftermath of World War II. Furthermore comparing those two countries offers the rare possibility of comparing a European society to a non-Western country without the necessity to pay attention to a (post)colonial path of the latter.
The proposed PhD program can deepen our understanding of possible Eurocentric limitations of key concepts and interpretations of civic or civil society. Research will be divided into five major research fields:
- History of ideas and concepts;
- Actors and self-organization;
- Relation between state and citizens;
- Civic society in a trans-national perspective;
- Historical and contemporary counter projects to civic society.
Joint research of German and Japanese historians and social scientists should be a starting point for empirical and theoretical approaches in bi-national cooperation. Supervision and scientific debate will be realised especially through regular joint workshops.
The program is expected to contribute to
- the internationalisation of research on civic society;
- a critical re-examination of theoretical concepts in European research in contrast to a non-Western case;
- qualifying post-graduate students for trans-disciplinary and intercultural research co-operation.
E-Mail: gesine.foljanty-jost@japanologie.uni-halle.de
Homepage: www.igk-buergergesellschaft.uni-halle.de
International Max Planck Research School on Retaliation, Mediation and Punishment (IMPRS REMEP)
Project Director: Prof Günther Schlee
International Max Planck Research School, Max-Planck-Institute for Social Anthropology
2008 -
The Research School is set up as an interdisciplinary research network connecting four Max-Planck Institutes and two universities. The contributing partners are the Max-Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law, Freiburg i.Br., where the central administration of the Research School is based, the Max-Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, Heidelberg, The Max-Planck Institute for European Legal History, Frankfurt/Main and the Max-Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale. The cooperating universities are the Albert-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg i.Br. and the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg.
The research activities of IMPRS-REMEP in Halle/Saale are organized in particular by Department I ‘Integration and Conflict’, headed by Prof. Günther Schlee and the Research Group ‘Legal Pluralism’, headed by Prof. Keebet von Benda-Beckmann, both of the Max-Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. University partner in Halle/Saale is the Institute for Social Anthropology, represented by Prof. Richard Rottenburg.
IMPRS-REMEP appeals to young researchers in criminology, disciplines of jurisprudence such as criminal law and international law, legal history, and social anthropology, especially the anthropology of law and conflict. Integral part of the interdisciplinary Research School is a PhD programme integrating dissertation projects within the framework of the research focus of REMEP. Five of these dissertation projects are affiliated to the contributing research units in Halle/Saale. The Research School offers an integrated curriculum, which is designed to impart access to the respective theoretical and methodological basic inventories and empirical approaches of all participating disciplines. Thus, the individual research projects are embedded in an interdisciplinary format.
The research agenda focuses on the fundamental question common to the disciplines of social sciences and humanities regarding how peace and social order are negotiated, constructed, maintained and re-gained. In particular, in the context of conflict and post-conflict societies, traditional approaches to reconciliation and mediation are being adopted, amending, and – partially – replacing, well-established systems of punishment mainly based on concepts of retaliation.
REMEP-Research at the Max Planck Institute in Halle/Saale concentrates on the fields of legal anthropology and conflict studies in the broadest sense of these terms. The focus of analysis is directed towards conflict and conflict settlement procedures (retaliation, mediation, punishment) in plural legal contexts and also includes strategies for inclusion and exclusion in conflict situations. Of special interest are configurations of various juridical repertoires, such as local or customary law, state law, religious law, or transnational norms for conflict management, including actors’ abilities to manoeuvre within or among these repertoires (e.g. forum shopping). Of equal importance are issues pertaining to the social construction of conflict parties and their identity patterns. This research programme encompasses dispute management within or between various groups or institutions at various levels of social organisation: in semi-autonomous social fields such as kinship groups and local groups; within or between ethnic or religious communities, both within or across national borders; between states; or in transnational settings. Research topics range from conflict resolution in acephalous societies to conflict management procedures in (post-) conflict societies (retaliation, punishment, compensation, reconciliation), for example, in the form of transitional or restorative justice or reconciliation processes. The interaction of global, local and translocal processes thus acquires special analytical importance.
The cooperation with criminologists, historians of law, experts in criminal law and international law brings a fresh input to anthropological research on global and transnational processes e.g. on ongoing processes of an increasing transnationalisation of law and its consequences. This allows for a widened scope on translocal and transnational interactions. One of the common research assumptions seems to emerge in this context: the hypothesis of an upgrading of local agency both towards state institutions and global actors in the realm of conflict management.
Coordinator and tutor of the PhD Candidates of IMPRS-REMEP in Halle is Bertram Turner, Senior Researcher in the MPI Project Group Legal Pluralism.
E-Mail: turner@eth.mpg.de
Homepage: www.mpicc.de/ww/de/pub/research_schools/imprs_remep.htm
Constitutional foundations of globalised financial markets - stability and change
Project Director: Prof Christian Tietje, ResearchTraining Group,
Faculty of Law, Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg
2009 - 2014
What kind of backlashes cause changes of the international financial markets in the regulating structures of national economies in this world? How does national and supra-national behaviour change thereby? To what extent can states either single-handedly or through international cooperation further develop and enforce basic public conditions onto the international financial markets?
What are the changes within the states themselves caused by these developments (globalisation and governance)? The interdependency between the rapidly growing global financial markets and public systems of order are multilayered.
The Research Training Groups’ goal is to examine these effects in order to consolidate two perspectives: On the one hand the independence of the financial markets, which provoke public entities to permanent reaction by their continual innovation processes, is to be emphasized. On the other hand the research program dedicates itself to the question, what fundamental public structures exist, which can stress commitment beyond the individual case as regulative elements of ordering in changing financial markets.
Public rules are based on overall analyses, which include benefits and costs of the markets. At first the question arises how to collect such data of benefits and costs on factual and normative grounds. Concerning the benefits of today, the advantages of free and competitive organised financial markets under the criterion of efficient allocation are acknowledged. At least the majority of the states utilises intensively the international financial markets, to attract direct investments, to issue government loans, or to invest own capital. In regard to the costs, factual agreement prevails that financial markets may be catalysts or hubs for fatal economic risks. Beyond this fundamental agreement, however, both in actual and normative regard there exists substantial uncertainty concerning handling of benefits and costs of the financial markets. For example the benefits of hedge funds are substantially disputed as well as the so-called sovereign wealth funds. Risk assessments of credit derivatives are rather unreliable. Still resonating is the example of the international financial crisis, which emanated from the US-American market for mortgage credits, underlines how unexpected and hardly predictable crises develop and reproduce themselves.
Beyond the benefit-cost-analysis there is a set of current challenges, which make it more difficult to impose basic conditions on financial markets: 1. The substantial innovative strength of the markets, which leads in short intervals to new products, which are in their positive or negative effects difficult to judge. 2. The permanently changing complexity within the financial markets concerning financial products and acting participants. 3. The complex entanglement of financial markets and real economy. 4. The widening gap between the global dimension of the financial markets and the regionally limited control of public entities, in the monetary policy or the supervision of financial markets. 5. At the same time the conditions change, on which international institutions can have a stabilising effect. Over the last years the assets of the financial market undermines the politics of conditionality of IMF and therefore considerably weakens the impact of known instruments. The aim of the research program is to establish an order which can work as a stabilising anchor in the dynamic environment of the international financial markets under the condition of vague perceptions.
Against this background the interdependency between financial markets and public institutions are to be grasped on three fields of topics:
- Financial system stability as an international task of regulation
- Adequacy of the international financial architecture
- Interdependency between financial markets and real economy
E-Mail: christian.tietje@jura.uni-halle.de
Homepage: www.gfinm.de