Project Details
Responses to Interface Conflicts: How Spheres of Authority Handle Conflicting Rules (RESPONSES)
Applicant
Professor Dr. Michael Zürn
Subject Area
Political Science
Term
from 2017 to 2022
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 277531170
The project RESPONSES analyzes the reactions to one particular type of interface conflict, namely those between different sectoral spheres of international authority. Our dependent variable is the handling of interface conflicts. We conceive of the handling of an interface conflict as an interactive outcome emerging from the individual responses to such a conflict from different types of actors. Our project aims at explaining which forms of conflict management evolve in response to horizontal interface conflicts. The question is approached from two angles. In one module, we identify sectoral interface conflicts as perceived by the secretariats of international organizations (IOs). In a second module, we analyze the G- summits (G7, G8, and G20) in order to probe the expectation of the literature that this site of international authority comes closest to the notion of a meta-authority in the international system, conceived as the place where interface conflicts are regularly managed. In this module, we identify those interface conflicts dealt with during the G7, G8, and G20 summits. Overall, the project RESPONSES aims at a) describing the forms of handling interface conflicts that emerge from the interaction between different spheres of international authority, b) explaining the conditions under which different forms of handling interface conflicts prevail, and c) assessing to which extent and where meta-authority is exercised in the global governance system.
DFG Programme
Research Units