International organizations like the EU or the International Monetary Fund have increasing influence on sovereign states’ domestic politics. International legal, commercial, and technical norms also seriously impact societies in nation-states and in part determine their actions. As a result, an increasing number of questions of legitimacy arise: Is the democratic sovereign contributing adequately to the development of such norms and agreements? To what degree are those decisions, taken on a supranational level, accepted domestically, if they are not entirely subject to the democratic decision-making process? Recent decades have shown that these entanglements are politicizing global decision-making processes.

How do relationships between constitutional statehood, democracy and human rights in the global context actually develop? Which norms guide action and what happens when different norms are in discordance with each other, like for example, reconciliation versus criminal justice after civil wars or mass atrocities? How do – both state and non-governmental – actors react when resistance to global agreements develops within nation-states? These core questions outline the focus of research in this area.

The Research Area International Politics and Law consists of the following research units:

• the Research Department Global Governance (Prof. Dr. Michael Zürn)

• the Research Professorship Global Constitutionalism (Prof. Dr. Mattias Kumm, S.J.D.)

• the Research Professorship Global Sociology (Prof. Yasemin Soysal, Ph.D.)

The following Visiting Research Professorships is also located in this research area:

• the Visiting Research Professorship Political Theory (Prof. Dr. Rainer Forst)

• the Visiting Research Professorship Global Politics (Prof. Peter Katzenstein, Ph.D.)

• the Visiting Research Professorship Emotional Idioms of Capitalism (Prof. Eva Illouz, Ph.D.)