Sie befinden sich hier: Forschung Forschung nach Rechtsgebieten Völkerrecht Tracking Systemic Change
A seeming consensus has developed that the international legal order is undergoing a period of significant disruption, yet few agreed indices have emerged for analysing the reality, form and magnitude of changes across the system. The project "Tracking Systemic Change: Policies for Constructing International Legal Order" engages government legal advisers and policymakers to develop an empirically grounded and systemic level understanding of the competing normative visions shaping international law.
The project focusses on the concept of comparative "international legal policy", which is defined as the specific type of foreign policy concerned with the conception of and strategies taken in relation to international legal rules and institutions. This interdisciplinary concept seeks to improve understanding of changes that extend beyond specific rules and institutions, by developing an account of the political approaches that states take towards legal authority. The research is thereby situated within the re-emerging field of Comparative International Law, but moves beyond questions about what the law "is" in contested cases in preference for comparing non-legal policy preferences of states that are nevertheless integral to the design and development of international law.
The core of the project is the conduct of qualitative research interviews with an internationally representative sample of government legal advisers and policy decision-makers more generally. These interviews investigate interviewee’s perceptions of the various national "roles" performed by their state, in its capacity as both a subject and author of international legal order, and the way these inform and guide competing international legal policy decisions. The project will subsequently convene an international workshop in Berlin, to bring together a selection of legal policymaker to engage with legal and political science scholars on emergent themes. The objective is to create direct engagement between insider and outsider perspectives on comparative international legal policy, in order to develop an account of systemic level changes in the international legal order.
Project Information
"Tracking Systemic Change" is a cross-institutional research project convened between Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, Heidelberg (Dr. Malcolm Jorgensen) and Humboldt University Berlin (Prof. Dr. Christian Marxsen), and is funded by the VolkswagenStiftung initiative "NEXT – Law between Normativity and Reality" over a period of 24 Months (January 2024 - December 2025).
