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Normale Wissenschaft? : Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung im Kanon wissenschaftlichen Wissens
(1999)
The sociology of violence still struggles with two critical questions: What motivates people to act violently on behalf of groups and how do they come to identify with the groups for which they act? Methodologically the article addresses these puzzling problems in favor of a relational sociology that argues against both micro- and macro-reductionist accounts, while theoretically it proposes a twofold reorientation: first, it makes a plea for the so called cognitive turn in social theory; second, it proposes following praxeological accounts of social action that focus on the dynamic interpenetration of cognition and socio-cultural practices. The argument is that symbolic boundaries constitute the “missing link” that allows for overcoming the micro-macro gap in violence research: Symbolic boundaries can cause people's participation in collective violence by providing the essential relational resources for violent action and by triggering the cognitive/affective mechanisms necessary for social actors to become drawn into mobilization processes that can cause their engaging in coordinated attacks on sites across the boundary. The article offers a new theoretical argument by drawing on knowledge from violence research, social action theory and cognitive science allowing for a non-reductionist theory of action that explains how and why people engage in collective violence.
Despite new challenges like climate change and digitalization, global and regional organizations recently went through turbulent times due to a lack of support from several of their member states. Next to this crisis of multilateralism, the COVID-19 pandemic now seems to question the added value of international organizations for addressing global governance issues more specifically. This article analyses this double challenge that several organizations are facing and compares their ways of managing the crisis by looking at their institutional and political context, their governance structure, and their behaviour during the pandemic until June 2020. More specifically, it will explain the different and fragmented responses of the World Health Organization, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund/World Bank. With the aim of understanding the old and new problems that these international organizations are trying to solve, this article argues that the level of autonomy vis-a-vis the member states is crucial for understanding the politics of crisis management. <br /> Points for practitioners <br /> As intergovernmental bodies, international organizations require authorization by their member states. Since they also need funding for their operations, different degrees of autonomy also matter for reacting to emerging challenges, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The potential for international organizations is limited, though through proactive and bold initiatives, they can seize the opportunity of the crisis and partly overcome institutional and political constraints.
Vorwort
(2021)
Although past research has emphasized the importance of international regimes for international gover-nance, systematic assessments of regime effects are missing. This article derives a standardized measure-ment concept for the effectiveness of international environmental regimes. It is based on a simultaneous evaluation of actual policy against a no-regime counterfactual and a collective optimum. Subsequently, the empirical feasibility of the measurement concept is demonstrated by way of two international treaties regu-lating transboundary air pollution in Europe. The results demonstrate that the regimes indeed show positive effects;but fall substantially short of the collective optima.
In December 2013, the Court at first instance in Bonn ruled on whether Germany is required to pay compensation to victims of the International Security Assistance Force airstrike ordered by a German colonel in 2009 in Kunduz. Whereas the traditional approach rejects liability of the government for sovereign acts in armed conflicts, the Court held that the rules of German governmental liability (Amtshaftung) do-in principle-apply to illegal sovereign acts in contemporary armed conflicts. However, the Court did not admit the claim on its merits. This judgment can, nonetheless, be placed within the line of questions regarding international relations to be resolved by law and not politics. This article examines the history of German jurisprudence regarding victims' compensation for harm suffered resulting from violations of international humanitarian law. It summarizes and assesses the Kunduz judgment and explains why applying legal liability to the government for sovereign acts in bello is a logical step in the development of the rule of law.