The Research Institute for Social Cohesion is an interdisciplinary, transfer-oriented and geographically dispersed institute. It has been in existence since 2020 and is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. The RISC combines basic research on social cohesion with application-oriented research on current challenges from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.

Knowledge transfer at the RISC ranges from classic policy advice to public formats in which results are prepared for different target groups. Knowledge transfer at the RISC also includes the co-production of knowledge with a broad network of practice partners.

The eleven locations – eight universities and three non-university research institutions – each contribute their own profiles to the RISC. They multiply the nationwide reach of our research and transfer activities. At the same time, they reflect the regional anchoring and diversity of social cohesion.

The RISC includes the Technical University of Berlin and the universities of Bielefeld, Bremen, Frankfurt, Halle-Wittenberg, Hanover, Constance and Leipzig as well as the Sociological Research Institute Göttingen, the Leibniz Institute for Media Research Hamburg and the Institute for Democracy and Civil Society Jena. The Institute’s office is located at the three coordinating locations Bremen, Frankfurt and Leipzig.

To the RISC website

FGZ location Frankfurt am Main

Democracy and social cohesion need productive conflict! The researchers at RISC Frankfurt research social struggles for recognition and participation and the productive power that can arise from such social and political conflicts.

The RISC Frankfurt at Goethe University looks back on a long and lively tradition of cooperation between philosophy, law and the social sciences in researching the foundations of social coexistence. This ranges from the beginnings of the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social Research to the Cluster of Excellence and Research Centre Normative Orders. At the same time, the location also brings specific expertise to the Institute as a whole, which deals with conflicts about cohesion and, above all, with the genesis and stabilization of cohesion in and through conflict.

Together with Bremen and Leipzig, the RISC Frankfurt site coordinates and manages the Research Institute for Social Cohesion. The general office with administrative management and the central services of research coordination and knowledge transfer are located here.

Here you will find information on research and transfer as well as an overview of the team at the RISC Frankfurt site.

To the website of the Frankfurt location

Supported by the

The Claus Wisser Fellowships at the Normative Orders, funded by a generous donation from the late Claus Wisser and carried out in cooperation with the Pro Universitate Foundation, bring two outstanding postdoctoral researchers to Frankfurt each year to conduct research on central questions of the transformation of normative orders. Each year a different theme is chosen; next year it will be “The Future of Democracy”. Prof. R. Forst and Prof. N. Deitelhoff are responsible for the program.

The current fellows of the Claus Wisser Postdoc Program are: Luca Hemmrich and Selma Kropp.

All current and former Fellows of the Research Center can be found here: People -> Fellows

ConTrust – Trust in conflict

As a joint research initiative of Goethe University and the Hessian Foundation for Peace and Conflict Research Frankfurt, ConTrust stands in contrast to prevailing trends in relevant research. Firstly, it does not see trust as an opposite concept to that of conflict, but assumes that trust only emerges, forms and proves itself in conflict: Trust in and through conflict. Secondly, the research initiative seeks to methodologically transcend conventional disciplinary boundaries in the study of trust and conflict as well as the gap between empirical and normative analyses. Thirdly, the initiative’s research places the “question of trust” in a framework that explores new qualities of uncertainty (and insecurity) that did not only become apparent during the coronavirus pandemic (but especially there). This also includes reflecting on the changing media in which trust and mistrust are communicated and constituted and conflicts are represented. Fourthly, it is made clear that, unlike in most alternative approaches, the concept of trust is not to be seen as entirely positive, but that there can also be authoritarian forms of trust that deny freedom and are politically destructive. Finally, the project aims to draw practical conclusions with regard to the possibilities of shaping conflicts in such a way that trust can be formed and stabilized in a productive manner. In this sense, dialog with society is an integral part of our research.

All news about ConTrust

To the ConTrust website

Conflicts are unavoidable in social contexts, and yet they do not make living together impossible. But where do we get the certainty that conflicts will not escalate, that our counterparts will abide by the rules, that institutions will protect us against transgressions and that the social world as a whole is stable enough for us to orient our actions within it in a meaningful way? The answer is trust. Trust creates an “unsecured certainty” that can never be fully redeemed and yet constitutes the secret of social coexistence. But how is trust formed, what are its origins?

These assumptions and intentions structure the joint, interdisciplinary, empirical and normative research into the dynamics of trust in key conflict contexts, ranging from democratic structures, international politics and markets to knowledge discourses and the media.

The researchers want to develop a diagnosis of the dynamics of trust and mistrust in typical conflict constellations and use it to establish an international center for trust and conflict research. Central measures to achieve this are the targeted recruitment and promotion of outstanding junior and mid-career level researchers in order to supplement and strengthen existing expertise. In addition, the appointment of several professorships at the Frankfurt site is planned to build the structure and profile of research in Frankfurt.

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The speakers of ConTrust are:

Prof. Dr. Nicole Deitelhoff

Prof. Dr. Rainer Forst

Dr. María Emilia Barreyro

Duration of the research project 12/2017 – 10/2021

The constitutional state has experienced more than one crisis in the 20th Century and the political and social events of the last decade indicate it’s facing another one. In effect, one of its central pillars, the idea of the rule of law, has recently been challenged from different positions. Populist movements, for instance, dispute its value because it is seen as dismissive of the will of the people. Positions that claim to rely on more realistic assumptions than normative theories, show that the permanent state of emergency has become one of the essential practices of contemporary states, including the so-called democratic ones, and thus, the rule of law is no more than ideology. From republican approaches, it’s pointed out that the standard notion of rule of law is consistent with new forms of arbitrariness, for instance, with respect to non-citizens persons, and therefore, a more robust concept of the rule of law is claimed.

Taking this debate into account, the main aim of my research project is to explore, within the framework of the discourse theory of democracy and law, a notion of rule of law that embraces the notion of human rights within its scope, including those rights that protects private as well as public autonomy. Thus, the reduction of non-arbitrary state-power as the main goal of the rule of law ideal will be coinceived as closely connected to the respect of both civil and political rights. The first part of my project will engage with the discussion about the independence of the rule of law from human rights protection, while the second part will show why the inclusion of the public dimension of autonomy within the scope of the rule of law is essential to illuminate the concept of arbitrary power, and with it, the concept of rule of law.

Selected publications related to this project

Barreyro, María Emilia and Carlos Gálvez Bermúdez, translation into Spanish of the paper “Noumenal Power” of Rainer Forst, Madrid, Las Torres de Lucca, 2019, V. 8, N°14.

Barreyro, María Emilia, “Direct-democratic Institutions: direct and democratic?”, United Kingdom, Jurisprudence. An International Journal of Legal and Political Thought, 2019, Volume 10, Issue 3, pp. 313-333. *peer-reviewed

Barreyro, María Emilia, “Formas puras y corruptas de referéndums. Notas para una evaluación de su legitimidad democrática”, México, Isonomía. Revista de teoría y filosofía del derecho, 2019, N°49, pp. 71-102. *peer-reviewed

Barreyro, María Emilia, “The purest form of communicative power. A reinterpretation of the key to the legitimacy of norms in Habermas’s model of democracy”; U.S.A., Constellations. An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory, 2018, Vol. 25, Issue 3, pp. 459-473. *peer-reviewed

Dr. Thomas Biebricher

Duration of the research project: 11/2017 – 12/2019

The aim of the project was to critically examine and review the history of German conservatism since the so-called ‘intellectual-moral turn’ of the early 1980s, whereby conservatism was examined both in its politically organized form and as a social-intellectual milieu. The methodological approach consisted primarily of qualitative text analysis of various genres, from academic monographs and newspaper articles to speeches and addresses by political protagonists, with particular emphasis being placed on relating the two dimensions of conservatism to each other in order to capture and analyze a conservative discourse that is quite heterogeneous in itself. The central thesis of this longitudinal study is that we are by no means dealing with a crisis of conservatism that erupted out of nowhere in the short term, but rather with a long-term process of erosion, depletion and, ultimately, exhaustion, for which a number of factors are responsible. The current state of German conservatism, according to the contemporary diagnostic thesis, can be described as a kind of substantially gutted procedural conservatism, which by no means rules out the possibility of continuing to generate a certain degree of approval at the level of political representation, but does raise the question of how long such a purified conservatism-as-pragmatism will be able to keep right-wing populist tendencies and forces in check.
The transfer of knowledge took the form of a large number of (semi-)public lectures, for example at the Demokratie-Stiftung Saarland or the Deutsche Bundesbank, as well as around ten newspaper articles/commentaries/interviews in national newspapers such as ZEIT, Tagesspiegel or Freitag.

Dr. Javier Burdman

Duration of the research project: 01/2018 – 12/2019

The project developed a new interpretation of the political thought of Jean-François Lyotard by reading it in dialog with other political thinkers. Lyotard’s influential notion of a “postmodern condition” is usually interpreted as a negation of the possibility of universal principles that orient political action and judgment in contemporary societies. Through a systematic analysis of Lyotard’s later work, which has received scarce attention by scholars, the research showed that its goal is not to deny universalism altogether, but rather to transform it. The first part of the project focused on a series of texts developed by Lyotard after the publication of The Postmodern Condition. The analysis of these texts showed that Lyotard produced a new conception of universalism. According to this conception, the universal aspirations of political action and judgment are not grounded on a universal rule or procedure, but rather on feeling. This feeling, Lyotard claims, is analogous to the feeling of the sublime in Kant’s aesthetics. In order to understand this analogy, the project inquired into Lyotard’s interpretation of Kant, another aspect of his thought that has received scarce attention.

The interpretative research showed that Lyotard developed a kind of “universality without consensus,” or a “conflictive universality.” The reason why scholars often misread Lyotard as dismissing universality altogether is the widespread presupposition that universality and disagreement are mutually exclusive. Lyotard, however, challenges this assumption. In his view, universal judgments stem from a feeling produced by the encounter of two radically heterogeneous discourses (such as science, narratives, art, technology, economics, etc.), with conflicting rules for judgments. The fact that, in order to judge, one set of rules must prevail over the other, generates a silence and a corresponding feeling that a voice remains to be heard. Political judgments are universal not by virtue of a rule for judgment that is by itself universally valid, but rather by virtue of inventing a new rule that allows for the expression of a voiced that had remained silenced. This means that universal judgments always take place within disagreements and can never crystalize in a fixed set of principles.

On the basis of this conception of universality, the project contrasted Lyotard’s views with those of authors within the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Habermas, Honneth) and Hannah Arendt. It was shown that, despite their differences, most authors within the Frankfurt School tradition remain committed to a notion of universality linked to a fixed standard that is beyond disagreement. Arendt, by contrast, believes that universality is constructed on the basis of taking into account multiple viewpoints at the moment of judgment. Lyotard’s view is unique in stressing the interrelation between universality and consensus. The research thus calls for further studies that problematize established notions of universality and its role in political action and judgment in contemporary societies.

The project had three main aims:
1) To challenge established readings of the political thought of Jean-François Lyotard.
2) To reassess the role of Lyotard’s thought within contemporary discussions around the nature of political action and judgment.
3) To develop a new understanding of the universalism of political action and judgment.

The project relied on an interpretative methodology that combined close reading, intertextual reading, and comparative reading. The close reading traced the development of a series of concepts across different texts, in order to specify their meaning and identify changes. Different essays by Lyotard, including unpublished manuscripts available at the archives, were contrasted with one another in order to identify the fundamental tenets of his thought. The intertextual reading traced the influence of different philosophical perspectives upon Lyotard’s thought. Especial attention was paid to Lyotard’s indebtedness to Kant’s critical philosophy, Wittgenstein philosophy of language games, and phenomenology. The comparative reading identified points of connection and disagreement between Lyotard’s views and that of other authors working on similar issues.

Selected publications related to this project
Burdman, Javier, “Universality without Consensus: Jean-François Lyotard on Politics in Postmodernity”, Philosophy and Social Criticism, Vol. 46 N. 3 (2020).
The article challenges the common misreading of Lyotard according to which he disavows the possibility of universal judgments in modern societies. It argues that Lyotard defends a “universality without consensus.” This universality is based on the feeling produced by the dissensus between different discourses, when one discourse is silenced by another one. The silence is “felt” as a universal demand to make previously unheard voices be heard.

Dr. Agustín E. Casagrande

Duration of the research project: 01/2018 – 12/2018

Argentina’s national and economic crisis in 2001 gave rise to intensive and fundamental debates on the design of the future political and social order. What should a just society that guarantees human rights and accepts and integrates diversity look like? In response to the crisis and the neoliberalism blamed for it, a policy of state hegemony has developed over the last fifteen years that is characterized by two main features: First, state intervention has been increased. Secondly, social diversity has been strongly promoted, in particular through the legal recognition of certain ethnic groups and social movements. The resistance that arose against this opposed the populist “power state” with the bourgeois-liberal “constitutional state”. This concept of the rule of law then came under ideological suspicion – it became synonymous with market-liberal justification strategies. At present, it can be said that the “rule of law” is in crisis as far as its legitimizing foundation is concerned.

In Argentina, the political and moral charge of the concept of the rule of law with alternating positive or negative connotations has a long tradition and is strongly linked to the socio-political implications assumed in each case. In the Argentinean debate, the concept of the rule of law could thus incorporate liberal or rather authoritarian, market-liberal or social-emancipatory, equality-based or difference-based concepts.

In the history of Argentinian constitutionalism, two different and contradictory constitutional traditions have emerged: the Anglo-Saxon liberal tradition and the nationalist state tradition. The basis of the liberal constitutional tradition was the political economy of the late 18th century, whose anthropological perspective only recognized economically rational individuals who treated each other as equals. In this model of formal equality, there was no room for the recognition of legal inequality and special legal spaces. For its part, the nationalist-state tradition, which was strongly influenced by corporatism and whose hegemony lasted from 1930 to 1955, relied on the state as the engine of social development. Not only corporate representation was part of this concept, but also the recognition of different actors and groups with special rights and obligations.

Based on these findings, the aim of the project was to historically reconstruct and contextualize understandings of the rule of law between 1930 and 2001. The key questions were:
Did the emergence of corporatist patterns of order around 1930 lead to a replacement of the traditional liberal, equality-based understanding of the rule of law with an understanding of the rule of law that recognizes and even promotes inequality?
In what way was the traditional understanding of the rule of law later rehabilitated or modified and enriched with other content?

Methodologically, this meant in detail a) analyzing the process of translating the German concept of the rule of law in a different semiotic space; b) describing the transformation/assimilation of the concept in the language of Argentine public law; and c) examining the different uses of the concept of the rule of law in different historical and political contexts.

This was intended to close a considerable research gap not only in Argentine legal history, but also in Argentine constitutional law.

Publications

Monograph:
Gobierno de justicia, poder de policía. La construcción oeconómica del orden social en Buenos Aires (1776-1829). Ed. Tirant lo Blanch, Valencia. (Jan. 2019). 257 pp.

Book Chapters:
Agustín E. Casagrande 2018, “Del progreso Estatal al presentismo local. Historia sociológica y sociología jurídica en las aulas de derecho” en Felipe Fucito (Ed.), Sociología Jurídica. Universidad de Buenos Aires, Eudeba, In press.
Agustín E. Casagrande 2018/19 “Estadística en el Río de La Plata a comienzos del siglo XIX. Límites conceptuales para la “fuerza del Estado”, en Agüero Alejandro, Tau Anzóategui, Tradición jurídica y discursividad política en la formación de una cultura estatal. Trayectorias rioplatenses, siglo XIX. Inhide, In press.
Voz del DCH: Confesos. En proceso de revisión y envío de los directores al SSRN Max Planck Institut.

Blogs:
History, pardon and Memory in Latin American Constitutionalism. https://verfassungsblog.de/history-memory-and-pardon-in-latin-american-constitutionalism/

Dr. Ilaria Cozzaglio

Duration of the research project: 07/2018 – 06/2021

The notion of progress is seminal when envisaging the future of our democracies. After all, when we think of what we wish for, and then look at what we actually have, we tend to envisage a way to reach the desired state of affairs. This ultimately means thinking of how we make progress.
The theoretical structure implied in the notion of progress, so far, has been the following: there is a state of affairs, an ideal, and a possible movement (progress) towards the ideal. Accordingly, the ideal is morally characterized as e.g. justice, equality, etc. However, in a political context more and more characterized by disagreement about values, and increasing scepticism about the existence of an objective moral truth, it seems difficult to reach an agreement on which ideal we should aim at. Therefore, either we renounce the idea of progress (Allen, 2016) or we are forced to conceive of it in a non-teleological way. Some proposals in the direction of conceiving of a non-teleological account of progress have been suggested (Forst, 2017). However, scholars suggesting this approach usually resist to conceive of progress as a contextualized notion, being worried that, by doing so, the notion might be emptied of its normative capacity. Although the concern is understandable, there is a shortcoming. Theorists in political realism may object that without a reference to the context, a universally valid notion of progress may be too detached from the vision of the world held by individuals subject to political power. In contrast, to ground a notion of progress on bottom-up standards, namely dependent on the values individuals hold in a specific context, has the advantage of letting people have a say when defining how their society should make progress. This represents a third option, i.e. a teleological notion of progress that includes bottom-up and context-dependent standards rather than universal ones.
To develop this third option, a realist notion of progress will be elaborated. Progress will be defined as a condition in which the political order increasingly reflects individuals’ justified beliefs and standards. While Singer (2011) defined progress as ‘expanding the circle of moral concern’, I will claim that we have political progress when there is an expansion of the circle of political concern, i.e. an expansion of the perspectives that participate, through the public debate, to defining the standards required to the regime.
The notion of progress will present three characteristics. First, it is understood as a political instead of a moral notion, which entails the specification of a new scope of application of the notion. Political realism claims the autonomy of the political from the moral sphere and prioritizes the demand for security and stability over the need for justice (Williams, 2005). Therefore, progress relates to securing more effectively cooperation and compliance (Ypi, 2013). Yet if this is the case, an agreement about which are the aims individuals cooperate for is critical to the notion of progress itself. Those aims are the result of bottom-up standards that individuals elaborate when envisaging which kind of political order they wish to live in.

Second, it will distinguish between a concept and a conception. A concept of progress describes the functioning mechanism of the notion: what progress is and what its content depends on; a conception of progress is a contextualized concept of progress that highlights the specific values individuals agreed on as seminal for their political community.
Third, it will entail the expansion of the circle of political concern, i.e. an expansion of the perspectives that participate to defining the standards required to the regime. Different perspectives, even if ultimately not included in the final standards elaborated by the majority of people living in a given regime, need to be at least listened to in a robust sense, i.e. individuals must have their own belief challenged by different beliefs, and provide the reasons of an eventual refusal to accept them. I will show how this claim can be justified in terms of political realism.

Following from this realist concept of progress, I will examine the related normative constraints. First, individuals’ beliefs need to pass the coherence test, which guarantees that the belief expressed is understandable by others (even if not shared). Second, to check the coherence of their own beliefs, individuals need to have them challenged by different beliefs, that is, they have to participate to the public debate in which different voices have a say. This constraint entails the duty to listen to minorities as part of the public debate space. Third, given that the overall progress partly depends on progress in coherence, there is a duty to check and revise beliefs, to acquire new information, and to promote cultural innovation (borrowing the term from Buchanan&Powell (2016)).

(working title) / ‘Generation Absent: Youth Identity and Belonging in the “Zanzibar Diaspora”‘

Dr. Franziska Fay

At the center of the comparative, ethnographic research project, whose majority Muslim and multi-religious urban research fields are located in Zanzibar City (Tanzania), Mombasa (Kenya) and Muscat (Oman), was the question of the conditions of multi-religious coexistence in times of decreasing tolerance with regard to religious diversity. The investigation of ‘multi-religious utopias’ makes it possible to question the qualities and characteristics of a social idea of ‘modernity’, which is characterized by the positive emphasis on intra- and inter-religious heterogeneity. Interfaith centers, which use project approaches to bring children and young people of different faiths together, were central points of orientation with regard to the project’s interest in knowledge.
The postdoctoral project was continued in 2020 under the title “Generation Absent: Youth Identity and Belonging in the “Zanzibar Diaspora””. The habilitation project, which emerged from the findings during the field research phases, then focused centrally on the contemporary translocal identity constructions of young people in the so-called ‘Zanzibar Diaspora’ (Zanzibari Omanis and Omani Zanzibaris), of which religious attribution processes are an integral part. Methodologically, the project relied on ethnographic research methods such as interviews and observations, but also on a dense analysis of social media spaces, also due to the Corona-related change in the research situation.

Publications:

Fay, Franziska: Ordinary Childhoods, Islam and the Everyday in Zanzibar. Journal of the British Academy [Special Issue: Searching for the Everyday in African Childhoods] (in preparation)

Fay, Franziska: Blending Belongings: Young Swahili-speaking Omanis and the Postdiaspora in Contemporary Oman. Arabian Humanities, Vol 15 [Special Issue: Oman Over Times: A Nation from the Nahda to the Oman Vision 2040] (under review)

Fay, Franziska: Living with Absence: Waiting Youth, Belonging, and the Contemporary ‘Zanzibar Diaspora’. Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies – Special Issue, Edited by Walker, Iain and Martin Slama. (forthcoming)

events

“Waswahili (Vijana) wa Oman na Dhana ya ‘Zanzibar Diaspora'”, Baraza la Kiswahili la Berlin (BALAKI-BE), ZMO (online) (2020)

“After Waithood? Contemporary Approaches to Research with Youth Across ‘Muslim Worlds’.” Organizer, International Workshop, Research Centre Normative Orders, Goethe University Frankfurt (2020)

“Youth Identity and Belonging in the Zanzibar Diaspora”, Presenter, Conference: Us and Them: Diasporas for Others in the Indian Ocean, Centre for Interdisciplinary Area Studies, Martin-Luther University Halle, Germany (2019)

Dr. Alexis Galán

Duration of the research project: 01/2018 – 12/2019

Legitimacy has become a central concern to international law in the last decades. The spike in attention to legitimacy in international law falls into a time of important institutional and normative transformations taking place within the international legal order. From a consensual normative order, centred on interstate relations, international law has evolved into a complex and dense normative framework encompassing areas that until recently seemed alien to international law. Parts of these transformations involve the shift of authority from the state to the international and transnational realm, the emergence of new forms of law-making into being, and multiple actors actively shaping the novel arrangements, producing normativity and its enforcement. The upshot of these developments is the further intrusion of international law in national political and legal processes and the exertion of pressure on those nations not in compliance with its norms.

In light of the vast impact of international law in the workings of domestic societies, for many the question of legitimacy has become impossible to ignore. Traditionally, the consent of the state was the ultimate legitimacy criterion. That criterion seemed appropriate when treaties, either bilateral or multilateral, were considerably simpler and their execution depended entirely on states. However, the significant expansion of international law’s regulatory reach and the dissolution of the national/international divide have created a new reality. As a consequence, the chain of legitimacy from the national to the international level determined at least in part by the consent of states has become weakened. Some then argue that we are confronted with a widening legitimacy gap, making the legitimation of international law a pressing concern.

The main objective of my research project was to propose an alternative understanding of legitimacy in international law. Instead of focusing on developing a substantive account of the concept, I focus on the contestedness surrounding the concept. For that, I propose instead a dynamic understanding of legitimacy. Under this approach, the analysis was not centred on ascertaining whether or not the various institutions and regimes forming the international legal order are legitimate, but rather on analyzing how actors attempt to expand or restrict the permissible boundaries of action of those very same institutions and regimes. Accordingly, the language of legitimacy should be viewed as a struggle between various actors with claims and counter-claims that are part of larger ‘strategic games of action and reaction, of question and response, [and] of domination and evasion’ (Davidson 1997, p.5). This alternative understanding of legitimacy allows us to identify the ways in which legitimacy matters and how it shapes the structure of institutions and regimes. To illustrate this understanding of legitimacy I analyzed the disputes within international investment regime and self-defence.

In-text references:

Davidson, Arnold I. (1997): “Structures and strategies of discourse: remarks towards a history of Foucault’s philosophy of language”, in: Arnold I. Davidson (ed.): Foucault and his interlocutors, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Selected publications related to this project:

Galán, Alexis (2018): ‘Julius Stone, aggression, and the future of the international criminal court,’ 18(2) International Criminal Law Review 304-330.

Galán, Alexis (2018): ‘The Shifting Boundaries of Legitimacy in International Law’, 87(4) Nordic Journal of International Law 436-465.

Galán, Alexis (2019): ‘The Search for Legitimacy in International Law: The Case of the International Investment Regime,’ 43(1) Fordham International Law Journal 81-128.