Michael Zürn (political scientist)

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Michael Zürn (born February 14, 1959 in Esslingen am Neckar ) is a German political scientist . Since 2004 he has been Director of the Global Governance Department at the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB) and Professor of International Relations at the Free University of Berlin as well as spokesman for the DFG Cluster of Excellence “Contestations of the Liberal Script”.

biography

Zürn received his Masters in International Relations from the University of Denver in 1984 . In 1987 he passed his first state examination in political science and German studies at the University of Tübingen . In the same year he attended the Essex Summer School in Social Science, Data Analysis and Collection. In 1991 he did his doctorate at the University of Tübingen on the subject of game theory, functionalism and international politics .

From 1989 to 1991 Zürn was a research assistant at the Institute for Political Science in Tübingen, 1991 visiting professor at the University of Denver and from 1991 to 1992 research assistant in Tübingen. Since 1993 he has been professor of political science at the University of Bremen in various functions: from 1995 to 2004 he headed the Institute for Intercultural and International Studies . From 1997 to 2000 he was director of the Center for European Legal Policy and from 2001 to 2003 director of the Institute for Political Science; From 2001 to 2003 he was a co-founder and board member of the Graduate School of Social Sciences (BGSSS) at the University of Bremen and from 2002 to 2004 headed the Collaborative Research Center "Statehood in Transition". In 2004 he moved to Berlin, to the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB) and to the Free University of Berlin. At the same time, he was founding director and dean of the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin from 2004 to 2009 .

In 2008 he co-founded the Berlin Graduate School for Transnational Studies (BTS), is a board member there and was director of BTS from 2015 to 2018. From 2016 to 2018 he was spokesman for the DFG research group Overlapping Spheres of Authority and Interface Conflicts in the Global Order and, together with Tanja Börzel, has been spokesman for the Cluster of Excellence "Contestations of the Liberal Script", which is funded by the German Research Foundation and at which in addition to the Free University of Berlin, the Humboldt University of Berlin , the Berlin Science Center for Social Research and five other Berlin scientific institutions are involved.

Since 2007 he has been a member of the social science class of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences . In 2014 he was elected to the Academia Europaea .

In addition, Zürn holds a number of offices in advisory or supervisory bodies: he has been a member of the Council of the University of Konstanz since 2018, a member of the Supervisory Board of the Heinrich Böll Foundation since 2017, and a member of the Board of Trustees of the German Foundation for Peace Research (DSF) since 2016 , since 2014 Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board of the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA) in Hamburg, since 2012 member of the Board of Trustees of the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg and member of the International Academic Council (IAC) of the Scientific Advisory Board and the Presidium of the German Society for Foreign Affairs Politics (DGAP).

Furthermore he was u. a. Member of the Presidium of the German Church Congress, the Senate of the DFG, on the Board of the Development and Peace Foundation , reviewer of the European Research Council (ERC), Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Käte Hamburger Kolleg / Center for Global Cooperation Research, and Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Cluster of Excellence “ Normative Orders ” at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt.

Together with Mitja Sienknecht, he is the editor of the blog “Orders Beyond Borders”, one of the editors of the Leviathan and a member of numerous editorial boards of social science journals.

He is married and has one child.

Research priorities

His scientific work can roughly be assigned to four subject areas: On the one hand, with his early work on regime theory and its further development for governance analysis, he contributed to opening up international relations to social-scientific institutionalism . He has contributed to a further development of actor-oriented institutionalism as a theory of international relations, which, since its foundation of the situation-structural approach, has aimed to develop a theory of action that is embedded in the recognition relationships and the ideal foundations of world politics. His theory of global governance continued this strand.

Second, Zürn made a decisive contribution to the fact that normative concepts found their way into the empirical analysis of international relations. His work on the role of the democratic principle and the role of the rule of law in world politics was groundbreaking. With this, Zürn made a significant contribution to the development of the field of "International Political Theory".

A third and more recent focus of Zürn's work is the empirical research of politicization processes and legitimation struggles in international organizations and their repercussions on national politics. The politicization concept introduced by Zürn has established a rich research program, which is particularly relevant in view of the current crises of European and international institutions was attested. This area also includes the more recent work on a new line of conflict between cosmopolitanism and communitarianism , which is essentially a dispute about the importance of borders and the increasing contrast between capital and labor in the age of globalization .

Fourth, Zürn has identified the interfaces between international relations and law in a number of important publications. It is particularly about the question of how legally written norms differ from other social norms in international relations and whether legal norms or even the rule of law have a legitimacy-generating character.

Works (selection)

Zürn has published a total of more than 300 publications in the most important journals in its specialist fields, including World Politics, International Organization, International Theory, European Journal of International Relations, Politische Vierteljahresschrift and Leviathan . Many of these publications were co-authored, so that new topics could always be explored. In an analysis of publications in German political science, it is therefore referred to as “the center of the German political science universe”.

His most important books include:

  • Just international regimes. Conditions and restrictions of the emergence of non-hegemonic international regimes are examined using the example of the world communication order. Haag & Herchen, Frankfurt am Main 1987, ISBN 3-89228-088-6 .
  • with Manfred Efinger and Volker Rittberger: International Regime in East-West Relations. A contribution to research into the peaceful handling of international conflicts. Haag & Herchen, Frankfurt am Main 1988, ISBN 3-89228-205-6 .
  • with Volker Rittberger: Research for new peace rules. Review of two decades of peace research. Academy of the Diocese of Rottenburg-Stuttgart, Stuttgart 1989, ISBN 3-926297-26-3 .
  • Interests and Institutions in International Politics. Fundamentals and applications of the situation-structural approach. Leske + Budrich, Opladen 1992, ISBN 3-8100-0979-2 .
  • Rule beyond the nation state. Globalization and denationalization as an opportunity. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-518-41018-0 .
  • with Marianne Beisheim, Sabine Dreher, Gregor Walter and Bernhard Zangl: In the age of globalization? Theses and data on social and political denationalization. Nomos, Baden-Baden 1999, ISBN 3-7890-5834-3 .
  • with Bernhard Zangl: Peace and War. Security in the national and post-national constellation. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-518-12337-8 .
  • with Günther Hellmann and Klaus-Dieter Wolf (eds.): The new international relations. Research status and perspectives in Germany. Nomos, Baden-Baden 2003, ISBN 3-8329-0320-8 .
  • with Bernhard Zangl: Legalization - Building Block for Global Governance? Dietz Verlag, Bonn 2004, ISBN 3-8012-0347-6 .
  • with Christian Joerges: Law and Governance in Postnational Europe. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2005, ISBN 0-521-84135-6 .
  • with Gregor Walter (Ed.): Globalizing Interests. Pressure Groups and Denationalization. State University of New York Press, Albany 2005, ISBN 0-7914-6510-1 .
  • with Helmut Breitmeier and Oran R. Young: Analyzing International Environmental Regimes. From case study to database. The MIT Press, Cambridge / Massachusetts / London / UK 2006, ISBN 0-262-52461-9 .
  • with Nicole Deitelhoff: Textbook of International Relations. The hitchhiker's guide to the IB galaxy. CH Beck, Munich 2016, ISBN 978-3-406-65439-8 .
  • A Theory of Global Governance. Authority, Legitimacy, and Contestation. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2018, ISBN 978-0-19-881998-1 .
  • with Pieter de Wilde, Wolfgang Merkel, Ruud Koopmans and Oliver Strijbis: The Struggle Over Borders, Cosmopolitanism and Communitarianism. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2019, ISBN 978-1-108-71822-6 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ P. Leifeld, S. Wankmüller, VTZ Berger, K. Ingold, C. Steiner: Collaboration patterns in the German political science co-authorship network . In: PLoS ONE . tape 12 , no. April 4 , 2017, doi : 10.1371 / journal.pone.0174671 .
personal data
SURNAME Zürn, Michael
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German political scientist
DATE OF BIRTH February 14, 1959
PLACE OF BIRTH Esslingen am Neckar