About us
How do political, legal, religious or economic orders establish and change, how do power structures crystallize, how are power and life chances distributed – also on a transnational level? The academics involved in the Research Centre Normative Orders think about these questions. It is about current social conflicts, in particular about a just order of society in times of globalization, and their long histories. The normative ideas that play a role in such processes and conflicts will be examined.
The questions are complex. This is why Research Centre Normative Orders at Goethe University Frankfurt works on an interdisciplinary basis: from philosophy, history, political science and law to ethnology, economics, sociology and theology.
Normative orders are understood as “orders of justification” that are historically founded and based on “narratives of justification”. They are characterized by certain legitimations, whereby norms and values of various kinds (morality, law, religion, to name but a few) intertwine or create tensions.
Goethe University’s Research Centre Normative Orders is a network in which a number of partner institutions participate, including the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt, the Institute for Social Research (Frankfurt am Main), the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law (Heidelberg), Point Sud, Centre for Research on Local Knowledge (Bamako, Mali) and the Technical University of Darmstadt.
The research centre emerged from the Cluster of Excellence “The Formation of Normative Orders”, which was funded by the German Research Foundation as part of the Excellence Initiative of the German federal and state governments.
Spokespersons of the research centre
Prof. Dr. Nicole Deitelhoff (Institute for Political Science) and
Prof. Dr. Rainer Forst (Institute of Political Science and Institute of Philosophy)
Managing Director
