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Subject Matter

Subject Matter

Subject Matter

Subject Matter

Over the last 30 years or so, capital mobility resulting from technological advances and the end of exchange controls has led to tax competition. By lowering tax rates on individual savings as well as on corporate income, governments hope to attract portfolio and direct investment. Empirical research has shown that individual countries do not always benefit from tax competition, but that they might gain from cooperation. In determining what form this cooperation should take, two questions are of central importance:

Subject Matter

The United Nations Security Council is widely considered to be the most powerful international institution in the international system. But how legitimate is the Council’s power? The bulk of the literature on that topic remains conceptual or theoretical as scholars tend to make legitimacy assessments with reference to objective standards (usually derived from democratic theory). As a result, we do not know how actors perceive the Council’s legitimacy. To address this gap this project examines evaluative statements that UN member states makes about the Councils legitimacy in UN General Assembly debates. The project asks three questions: (1) How legitimate or illegitimate is the Council in the eyes of UN member states? (2) What are its sources of legitimacy?

The infamously capricious Roman tyrant Nero was said to post his edicts high on the columns of Rome so that his subjects would find them difficult to read and were thus more likely to violate them. What we can learn from this anecdote is that uncertainty about the law’s content promotes non-compliance, and that the rule of law requires that legal rules display certain features, such as publicness, clarity, non-retroactivity, etc. These features enable the law to discharge one of its core objectives, namely to stabilize actors’ normative expectations in an otherwise rather volatile world. To be sure, one way of achieving this is to commit government to fundamental primary rules of behavior; yet commitment to primary norms alone does not suffice for upholding the rule of law.

The project involves the analysis of the evolution of world order, its underlying normative differences and conflicts as well as the question of the legitimacy of international authority. The aim is to link together the participating Leibniz Institutes (besides the WZB, the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA) in Hamburg, and the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF) in Frankfurt am Main) usinga common analytical framework that integrates the concepts of "rising powers", "opposition, dissidence and justice" and "politicization" which have beenseparately analysed in the three institutes.

The research group, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), focuses on the rise of interface conflicts within and across overlapping spheres of authority. The increased institutional production of rules and norms in the international realm leads to both horizontal interface conflicts at the same level of governance (e.g. across two or more international spheres of authority) and vertical interface conflicts across spheres of authority on different levels of governance (e.g. international and national spheres of authority). The work of the research group is guided by the following questions: Under which conditions become such conflicts manifest? What are the responses to conflicting rules originating from overlapping spheres of authority?