Werner Gephart - Law and Globalization. Some preliminary remarks

In the framework of the research program of the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities “Law as Culture” initially set for six years, we are nearing the point where we emphasize the emergence of normative orders, including law, in the context of globalization. Speakers like Rudolf Stichweh, Upendra Baxi or Martin Albrow, who are among those who informed the international globalization discourse, have taken up residence at the University of Bonn or arrived at the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities “Law as Culture” as fellows. Together with them, we wish to: illuminate the many facets of globalization; examine the categorical question of an adequate conceptualization strategy (do our concepts, influenced by the nation state and national societies, still fit or do we have to leave this “container”?); test the seriousness, with which we understand the value problems of new poverty zones created through globalization; measure the cognitive effort necessary to theoretically capture the simultaneity of localizing, globalizing, glocalizing, border-transcending and regressive tendencies; and contrast the claims to validity of rights applicable to every human being – human rights – in different spaces of validity of secular and religious validity cultures with the inanity of a McDonaldization and a ‘globalization of nothing’ with the claims to validity. All this is a herculean task.

Yet we cannot escape this problem. We therefore seek to combine the refinement of globalization theorists, who oftentimes have been unable to cast aside their imperially and colonially influenced thought patterns, with the experience in interpretation and conceptualization offered by international legal disciplines.

Prof. Dr. jur. Werner Gephart is professor of sociology at the University of Bonn and director of the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities “Law as Culture”.