Translating International Norms between the Global and the Local

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Thomas Risse
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: since 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 391950806

The proposed Koselleck project examines the diffusion of international norms as translation pro-cesses between the global and the local in the areas of trade, climate change, human rights, and the rule of law across world regions with a particular emphasis on the Global South: How and under what conditions are norms translated “between the global and the local,” leading to various degrees of change in institutions and behavior? The proposed project is theoretically innovative, as it seeks to integrate compliance and diffusion research, work on legal transfers, and translation studies in a unified framework to develop scope conditions for the effects of various translations on institutional and behavioral change. The methodological innovation consists of combining com-puterized, corpus-linguistic, as well as human-coded text analyses. Are these newly available quantitative content-analytical approaches suitable to understand meanings and subtle differ-ences in norm translations? Empirically, the project will compare norm translations with regard to international trade and climate change, on the one hand, and human rights as well as the rule of law, on the other hand. Case studies involve countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia varying colonial legacies, regime type, and degrees of (limited) statehood resulting in different degrees of norms resonance, legal traditions, public arenas, as well as legal and normative pluralism.

• DFG Programme: Reinhart Koselleck Projects