Consortium led by SPP dean awarded multi-year research grant on “Global Norm Evolution and the Responsibility to Protect”

The Volkswagen Foundation in cooperation with the Compagnia di San Paolo and the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond awarded a two-and-a-half year grant to a consortium co-led by SPP Dean Wolfgang Reinicke for a project on “Global Norm Evolution and the Responsibility to Protect”. The grant in the framework of the “Europe and Global Challenges” competition provides an opportunity to intensify the research cooperation between CEU and the Berlin-based Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi) which leads the global consortium. In addition to CEU (where Prof Xymena Kurowska of IRES is the lead researcher) the consortium includes major global partners: Oxford University (Dr Ricardo Soares de Oliveira) , the University of Frankfurt (Prof Christopher Daase), Peking University (Prof Zhang Haibin,Dr Liu Tiewa), FGV in Rio (Prof Matias Spektor) as well as Nehru University in Delhi (Prof CSR Murthy). Wolfgang Reinicke (SPP/GPPi) and Thorsten Benner (GPPi co-founder and associate director as well as SPP) are the lead applicants. Philipp Rotmann at GPPi will be the lead coordinator of the consortium´s research activities.

The project seeks to push the research of global norms to a new frontier that takes into account the fact the contestation of norms and the co-shaping by non-Western powers is likely to become a common phenomenon in the decades to come. Specifically, the project addresses two overall research questions. 1) How did the positions of major powers and their practices of norm promotion with regard to the global norm of the “Responsbility to Protect” evolve? (2) How did the interaction between major powers shape the evolution of the global norm? All of our empirical work will be undertaken jointly in pairs of researchers, most connecting a Western and a non-Western researcher. It comprises two parts. The first part – actor analysis – is driven by the first research question and focuses on how seven major powers sought to influence a responsibility to protect between 2005 and 2012: Brazil, China, the European Union, India, Russia, South Africa and the United States. The second part – interaction analysis – is the analytical core of the project: In nine in-depth case studies of critical junctures between 2005 and 2012, we will examine how the interaction dynamics between major powers influenced the norm’s evolution.