Global Talk, Local Action: Norm Implementation Through United Nations Operational Activities

• Applicant: Dr. Hannah Birkenkötter
• Subject Area: Public Law
• Term: from 2021 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 458394092

The project investigates the United Nations’ role in locally implementing international norms and standards through its operational activities, i.e. its work in the field. To this end, the project asks how a given country integrates international norms into its domestic legal order, whether this is related to the United Nations’ presence on the ground, and to what extent the organization’s action on the ground is in turn conditioned by its mandate and its institutional presence. Specifically, the project explores how United Nations civil servants engage with local actors and what the legal framework for such engagement is. The focus on formal legal rules that guide activities by international civil servants adds a distinctly legal perspective to existing research on international bureaucracies. As a first step, the project will provide a systematic overview of legal bases for operational activities and of the kinds of institutional presence the United Nations maintains in its member states. In addition to traditional peacekeeping mandates, this crucially includes mandating structures from the United Nations’ development sector: currently, the world organization maintains some 14 peacekeeping missions and some 26 special political missions, but also more than 140 country offices under the auspices of the UN Development Programme. On the basis of this overview, the project will proceed to empirically investigate whether the kind of institutional presence (peacekeeping mission, special political mission, country office) affects the way in which the United Nations as an international organization impacts the domestic legal system with which it engages. This will be done through comparing two cases of UN engagement on the ground: Mexico and Colombia. While both countries share a number of characteristics, such as regional impact, constitutional culture and language, they represent a Security Council-mandated mission context (Colombia) versus a non-mission setting (Mexico) and thus lend themselves well to a comparative study. This comparative exercise will allow to draw broader conclusions on how United Nations civil servants foster the promotion of global norms, and to what extent this is conditioned by formal mandating structures within the United Nations system.

• DFG Programme: WBP Fellowship
• International Connection: Mexico
• Host: Professor Dr. Alejandro Rodiles Bretón