Call for Papers
Rethinking Governance in a World of Complexity
Two-day Workshop on June 27th-28th, 2013, in Duisburg, Germany

The Käte Hamburger Kolleg / Centre for Global Cooperation Research is a new and independent research institution of the University of Duisburg‐Essen which hosts 15-20 international fellows per year. It is located at Duisburg’s Inner Harbour, which combines industrial heritage with modern office buildings and a vibrant urban culture. The Centre focuses on the cultural premises and dynamics of emergent governance structures in current world society and analyses the possibilities for global cooperation.

Within its research cluster on “Paradoxes and Perspectives of Democratisation”, the Centre will hold a workshop “Rethinking Governance in a World of Complexity” on June 27th-28th, 2013. We are calling for both theoretically sophisticated and empirically driven papers around the central themes of the workshop:

1. Process and Governance
· Do governments govern today or does society govern?
· How does governance cope with complexity? What does it mean to govern through complexity?

2. The Implications for Democracy
· What role does democracy play in the governance of complexity?
· Can democracy still involve representative legitimacy?
· How are legitimacy claims articulated?

3. Complexity and Market Rationalities
· Does the rationality of the market stand external to societal interaction?
· Is complexity governed ‘for’ the market or ‘through’ the market?
· Is Marx relevant as a theorist of markets as complex adaptive systems with emergent causality?

4. Space and Complexity
· Does governance displace territorial conceptions of government?
· What does it mean to assert that the public is constituted through its problems?
· Is temporality displacing spatiality in International Relations and Geography?

5. Governance Beyond Resilience?
· Is resilience the solution to governing complexity?
· What role do the concepts of vulnerability and adaptation play in discourses of complexity?
· Has there been a shift beyond neoliberal constructions of resilience?

The Käte Hamburger Kolleg / Centre for Global Cooperation Research has invited Prof. Robert Jessop (University of Lancaster) to hold a keynote lecture Beyond the Regulation Approach: Rethinking State Power and Governance in a World of Complexity on June 27th. Prof. Jessop’s participation, though, is still to be confirmed.

The workshop will be hosted by Prof. David Chandler, University of Westminster and Senior Fellow of the Centre for Global Cooperation Research, and Prof. Tobias Debiel, University of Duisburg-Essen and Director of the Centre. We welcome abstracts of 250 to 400 words. They should be sent to Jan Schablitzki <Jan.Schablitzki@uni-due.de> by April 8th. We will notify on paper acceptance by April 15th. The papers (4,000 to 7,000 word) should be submitted one week before the workshop and can have a draft character.

The Centre will provide accomodation and domestic travel. With regard to travel from abroad, the Centre has limited funds at its disposal and will approach international participants after the acceptance of the abstract accordingly.