[FUB-GEAS] GIGA Institutions Conference April 10-11

[Newsletter Graduate School of East Asian Studies <fub-geas@lists.fu-berlin.de>]

Conference Announcement: Adapting Institutions: A Comparative Area Studies Perspective @ GIGA Hamburg, 10-11 April 2014

Neuer Jungfernstieg 21
20354 Hamburg
Germany

 

Institutions are created to regulate social life and prepare society for upcoming challenges. Arguably most of the existing formal institutions are meant to regulate conflicts of different type and scope (such as police, justice, electoral authorities etc.). However, at times, such conflict management institutions (or the quest to reform or improve them) remain promises rather than reality. The functioning of institutions depends on various aspects, such as contextual conditions, the changing dynamics of conflicts and the behaviour of actors. One logical assumption is that institutions need to be adapted to those factors and actors in order to fulfil their intended functions. This view of flexible and adaptable institutions may also imply certain risks: “over-adaptation” could simply serve to replicate a non-desirable status quo.

Mainstream political science approaches are strongly shaped by experiences and debates in a limited number of Western/Northern societies. Thus, political science tended to overlook the global variations of institutions for a long time, as well as their functions and patterns of adaptation. However, actors from the Global South tend to resist the homogenising attempts by the North and the UN system to turn them into globally isomorph institutions – specifically, by creating new forms of institutions and practices. This has resulted in the emergence of "hybrid" institutions or situations in which different institutions meant to deal with the same or similar societal problems (e.g. transitional justice versus the formal justice system; legal pluralism) co-exist and overlap.

Hence, the “Adapting Institutions” conference aims at examining these variations through the use of cross-regional comparisons. Some papers presented will be cross-regional in nature; others will help provide a cross-regional perspective only when contrasted with other papers during the discussion. This perspective will help us to determine the degree of “area boundedness” of different institutions and whether other categories (e.g. autocracies versus democracies, or poor against well-endowed polities) are better at explaining institutional choices.

 

 

Please find more information in the attached pdf and via the GIGA website: http://www.giga-hamburg.de/de/veranstaltung/adapting-institutions-a-comparative-area-studies-perspective

 

 

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Graduate School of East Asian Studies

Freie Universität Berlin

Hittorfstr. 18

14195 Berlin

 

http://www.geas.fu-berlin.de

 

 

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