The increasing density and entanglement of international law and institutions leads to a growing potential for collisions between norms and rules emanating from different international institutions. It is an open question, however, when actors actually create manifest conflicts about overlapping...

Die Bilanz der internationalen Bemühungen um eine Stärkung staatlicher Strukturen auf dem Balkan, im Irak und in Afghanistan kann nicht zufriedenstellen. In vielen Einsätzen werden die Grenzen zwischen militärischen und polizeilichen Aufgaben immer durchlässiger. Dort tut sich eine Grauzone...

European Studies used to be dominated by legal and political science approaches which hailed the progress of European integration and its reliance on law. The recent set of crises which struck the EU have highlighted fundamental problems in the ways and means by which European integration...

The DFG research group, "Overlapping Spheres of Authority and Interface Conflicts in the Global Order" (OSAIC), focuses on the rise of interface conflicts within and across overlapping spheres of authority. The increased institutional production of norms in the international realm leads to both...

This essay analyses the consequences of contested multilateralism (CM) for the level of constitutionalisation of specific multilateral institutions. We argue that CM has implications for institutions’ constitutional quality in particular if it is polity-driven and not (merely) policy-driven,...

This article theorises the relationship of crisis and political secrecy in European public policy. Combining the literatures on crisis management and securitisation, it introduces two distinct types of crisis-related secrecy. (1) Reactive secrecy denotes the deliberate concealment of information...

The most recent transformation of world order is often depicted as a shift from a Westphalian to a post-Westphalian era in which international organizations are becoming increasingly independent sites of authority. This internationalization of authority is often considered as an indication of...

This article analyses the emergency governance of international organizations by combining securitization theory with legal theory on the state of exception. Our main argument is that where issues are securitized as global threats, exceptionalism can emerge at the level of supranational bodies,...

This contribution contends that the European Union (EU) has taken an authoritarian turn in the past crisis decade, which needs to be systematically addressed in EU studies. Starting from an ideal-typical conception of scenarios for the EU’s emergent political order, it argues that there has...

This paper applies the concept of emergency powers to the crisis politics of international organizations (IOs). In the recent past, IOs like the UN Security Council, the WHO, and the EU have reacted to large-scale crises by resorting to assertive governance modes bending the limits of their...