Special Research Interests
IN-EAST Scholars – Special Research Interests
Flemming Christiansen
The Frontier of Industrialization in Continental North-East Asia
Current research
The research focuses on the frontier between “empires” in North-East Asia as the site of industrialization processes since the 1890s up till today. The project is a joint effort with colleagues working in Sociology and History to develop common themes for possible third-party funding.
Flemming Christiansen
The Frontier of Industrialization in Continental North-East Asia
Current research
The research focuses on the frontier between “empires” in North-East Asia as the site of industrialization processes since the 1890s up till today. The project is a joint effort with colleagues working in Sociology and History to develop common themes for possible third-party funding.
Flemming Christiansen
China’s Urbanisation Processes and the Emergence of New Political and Social Structures in China
Current research
Explorations of how new-style communities (shequ, i. e. local-level residential areas of public-policy provisioning) emerge in a medium-sized city in central China. The empirical research examines, in the first instance, how communities cater for the social transitions of peri-urban rural people relocated into urban settings and also seeks to capture the broad variety of interests, purposes and administrative logics that determine their structure and path of development. This research topic is driven by an interest in explaining how social developments in China reflect coherent systemic logics.
Broader research interests include the Chinese in the global economy, whereby the ethnic Chinese workers overseas are regarded as part of the same “supply chains” as migrant workers in China. This research seeks to understand how forms of social and ethnic exclusion are framed in different contexts, reflecting pressures from the global economy.
Winfried Flüchter
The Territorialisation of the Sea: Maritime Boundary Conflicts in East Asia – Powers, Interests and National Identities
Current research
Since 1994, the juridical guidelines of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) are applied for making use of the biggest “land seizure” of the sea in history. Particularly the impact of the establishment of an Exclusive Economic Zone upon the oceans has been immense. Instead of res nullius (“nobody’s object“), large parts of the ocean space and its resources (approximately one third) have been “nationalized”, i.e. brought under coastal state jurisdiction (however not state sovereignty). With regard to East Asian Waters this research project focusses on the open conflicts the abutting nations (China, Japan, Russia, South Korea) are faced with each other in terms of
(1) the national belonging of whatever tiny, putatively unimportant islands, lumps of rock or coral reefs and, based on their existence, the establishment of an Exclusive Economic Zone
(2) the struggle for islands between China and Japan (Diaoyu/Senkaku), between Japan and South Korea (Takeshima/Dokdo) and between Japan and Russia (southern Kuriles) in the context of UNCLOS’ maritime boundary guidelines and of history
(3) hyper-nationalism as part of territorial disputes: Reasons and risks for military escalation. Why nationalism is so much entwined territorially?
(4) paradigm shift back to traditional geopolitics? Learning from history?
(5) managing and resolving territorial disputes in East Asia based on a combination of different values of international relations theories (particularly constructivism and liberalism).
İbrahim Öztürk
The Belt and Road Initiative as a Hybrid International Public Good (IPG)
Current research
This research is on the institutional quality of BRI as a newly evolving governance platform with IPG characteristics to stimulate global cooperation in infrastructure development across the Eurasian landmass, the heartland of the emerging multiplex world. With an interdisciplinary perspective, the research employs Agency and Institutional Economic theories to address potential principal-agent controversies and therefore resulting collective action problems. They must be minimised in a way that BRI could successfully address both the conflicting as well as overlapping demands and supply conditions of a needed hybrid IPG, which requires an effective amalgamation between the Western experience of public good creation in the post-WW2 and China’s indigenous values. These qualities of BRI are questioned in the specific context of Central Asia that takes place along its critical West-Asian economic corridor.
Werner Pascha
The Current Wave of Infrastructure Initiatives, Focussing on the Role of Japan
Own funds, from 2018
There is a lot of interest on the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative due to its economic weight and political as well as geo-strategic repercussions. At the same time, BRI is not the only initiative in this field. Rather, BRI should be seen in the context of other national and multilateral schemes. For instance, the reforms of BRI that were announced during the Second BRI Forum in 2019 can only be understood when taking the dynamism of various parallel developments into consideration. The current project covers this perspective. As for national approaches, the project focuses on Japan, whose “Partnership for Quality Infrastructure” of 2015/16 is a reaction to BRI, but also reflects on earlier Japanese initiatives, at least going back to the 1990s. On the multilateral level, mechanisms like G7, G20 and OECD have taken up the idea of “quality infrastructure”. The project has so far led to various articles on different aspects of the topic.
Giulia Romano
“Community Governance” with Chinese Characteristics? Learning from Abroad and Innovating for Elderly Care in China
Project supported by the UDE-Programm zur Förderung des exzellenten wissenschaftlichen Nachwuchses
Urban property markets are more and more in the focus of financial investors. The links between the financial economy and the property markets imply many risks for the whole economy on all spatial scales as the latest example of the financial crisis of 2008 has shown. On the other hand access to affordable housing is a growing problem not only in less developed countries but also in the developed world, a problem that is intensified by the financialisation oft the economy. Both, the financialisation of urban property markets as well as the growing housing poblem unfold on different spatial scales. Urban and economic geography have a set of theoretical and methodological approaches and tools to offer for analysing the heterogenous dynamics of urban property markets. The research focus is especially on the links between different spatial scales affecting those dynamics. A special focus is on Düsseldorf and the former industrial and workers quarter of Oberbilk.
Giulia Romano
The Appropriation and Adaptation of Citizen Participation in a Chinese City: A Step to “Democratic Deliberation”, an Instrument of Power Reassertion and/or Something Else?
Inspired by studies dedicated to citizen participation in European countries, this research project brings the focus to Chinese cities, which in the last decades have witnessed the introduction of several participatory instruments (allegedly) aiming at improving state-society relations, governmental transparency, and at gathering support and advices for the development of new policies and for the realization of urban projects. Observing these developments, this research project wishes to interrogate the meaning(s), purposes and uses of resident participation in a non-democratic context. The project in particular focuses on resident participation in urban renewal projects, investigating the framing, the practices, the instruments and the aims of the local administrations in the introduction of spaces for participation. It does so by trying to unearth the logics behind the adoption of resident participation, analyzing this instrument within the dynamics specific to bureaucratic and political action.
Helmut Schneider
Geography of Urban Property Markets
Current research
Urban property markets are more and more in the focus of financial investors. The links between the financial economy and the property markets imply many risks for the whole economy on all spatial scales as the latest example of the financial crisis of 2008 has shown. On the other hand access to affordable housing is a growing problem not only in less developed countries but also in the developed world, a problem that is intensified by the financialisation oft the economy. Both, the financialisation of urban property markets as well as the growing housing poblem unfold on different spatial scales. Urban and economic geography have a set of theoretical and methodological approaches and tools to offer for analysing the heterogenous dynamics of urban property markets. The research focus is especially on the links between different spatial scales affecting those dynamics. A special focus is on Düsseldorf and the former industrial and workers quarter of Oberbilk.
Helmut Schneider
Geopolitics of the Chinese Belt and Road Initative
Current research
The Chinese Belt and Road Initiative was launched in a period of rapid change of the global world order. Globalization has slowed down since the financial crisis of 2008 and the hegemonial position of the United States has weakened significantly. At the same time the growing global political weight of the PR of China can be observed. When a hegemonial regime is declining and a new one is not yet implemented, the world is entering a period of growing rivalry of regional powers, each trying to control their zones of influence: The control of (smaller) territories is gaining importance over the control of flows and networks, and the probability of territorial conflicts is growing. In science and in politics geopolitics is back on the agenda. The geopolitical research questions are: Will the Chinese BRI in the present period of rapid change of the global world order help to produce and guarantee much needed global public goods like the freedom and safety of trade, travel and communication, the safety of investments, the rule of law, a stable global financial system? Or will it, as part of a national imperial strategy, add further to global rivalry and conflict (like e.g. the conflict in the South China Sea)?
Helmut Schneider
Environmental Conflicts in Southeast Asia
Current research
In this research environmental conflicts are defined as conflicts in which environment or single natural elements (e. g. water, land) play a crucial role. That does not necessarily mean, that such conflicts are also caused by e.g. environmental degradation (although sometimes this might be the case). It is assumed that environmental conflicts, as conflicts in general, can only be understood and solved, when their (social, cultural, economic and political) context is considered properly. A basic hypothesis is that environment and natural elements, as a rule, are functioning as threat multipliers rather than single causes of conflicts. And they do so in very different ways. Due to the already noticeable, more so the predicted effects of climate change and a growing interest of financial investors for natural resources it is assumed, that environmental conflicts in Southeast Asia will increase in the future in terms of numbers as well as degree.
Karen Shire
SOEP Innovation Panel Module on Household Use of Personal and Household Services
With Rainer Schnell, 2015–2017
A module about household employment practices in relation to the outsourcing personal and household services was accepted and included for the 2015 Innovation Panel of Socio-Economic Panel. In 2016 the data became available, and two publications are currently under submission. The results were presented in research groups at the Hanse Wissenschaftskolleg in February 2017 and at the Conference of Europeanists in Glasgow in July 2017.
Karen Shire
Gendering the Resilience to Disasters and Crises – Japan and Germany in Comparison
Principle Investigator Prof. Mari Osawa (Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo),
JSPS Grants-in-aid for Basic Research (A), 2016–2018
The participants presented preliminary research at the European Association of Japanese Studies meetings in Lisbon, August 29 – September 2, 2017.
Markus Taube
The Institutional Foundations of Innovation in China
Current research
In recent years, innovation research has clearly shown that innovation-driven economic development relies on a broad foundation of benign cultural, social, political, and economic framework conditions. Institutions based in various social regimes must incentivize innovation creating behavior as well as the acceptance and diffusion of these very innovations in society. There exists no “one-fits-all” institutional set-up outlining the preconditions for successful innovation-driven development. Cultural idiosyncrasies, variations in the availability and costs of specific resources and competencies, specific goals of ruling elites etc. all lead to specific manifestations and combinations of institutions that in their totality promote innovation in varying intensity and on differing social and technological trajectories.
Against this background, China constitutes a highly interesting case study for the analysis of the institutional requirements as well as evolutionary genesis of innovation-driven economic development in a large non-Western society. After three decades of highly successful catching-up economic development based on the emulation of foreign institutions, business models and technologies, the Chinese economy has now reached a stage where it needs to foster more endogenous innovation in order to evade (relative) stagnation in what has become known as the “middle income trap”. This requires substantial alterations not only in the structural set-up and incentive systems governing the Chinese economy, but also in the fabric and underlying norms and values structuring society as well as the self-understanding of the political elite and its organization of political processes.
The Chinese business sector is already responding to the need for more endogenous innovation in all sectors and segments of the economy. By doing so, it is exerting pressure for changes in the social fabric. At the same time Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party appear to be highly committed to transforming the economic system and promoting an innovation-friendly institutional set-up – while upholding an unwavering claim to power. The Hayekian postulate according to which only free (democratic and market-based) societies can feature dynamic, innovation-driven development dynamics instantly comes to one’s mind as a “belief” of Western institutionalism and “Ordnungspolitik” that needs to be reflected upon in the Chinese context.
Markus Taube
The Chinese State-Business Nexus
Current research
When China joined the WTO in December 2001, it agreed that other countries, notably the European Union (EU) could continue to treat it as a “non-market economy” for the purposes of trade defense measures. The background to this special arrangement lay in the fact that at the turn of the century the Chinese economy was still in transition from a centrally planned economy to a market economy based on scarcity prices and free competition. There neither existed a comprehensive set of institutions that could support comprehensive market exchanges in the economy, nor was the government willing and give up its claim to directly steer economic development of the economy, its sectors as well as its major firms.
In expectation of substantial progress of China’s transition towards a full-fledged market economy in the coming years, the Protocol of Accession of China to the WTO outlined that 15 years after its accession China’s status might be upgraded to a “market economy”. While China interpreted the wording of these paragraphs as guaranteeing it an automatic transition to “market economy” status, the EU upheld the position that China would have to demonstrate that it complies with the five criteria defining the “market economy” status. With all economic observers agreeing, that China did not fulfil these criteria (by a wide margin) at the end of 2016, the dispute focused on juridical exchanges on the existence of a guarantee or not. Eventually, the dispute was solved with some diplomatic genius that neither awarded China the status of a “market economy”, nor inflicted a massive loss of face to one of Europe’s most import trade partners and thereby might have provoked an open trade war. The solution found is to completely give up the differentiation between “market” and “non-market” economies – not only with regard to China, but all economies. Instead, for all trade defense measures the normal reference value will be the domestic prices. However, if significant distortions (e.g. caused by state interferences) affecting domestic prices can be shown to prevail, international benchmark prices can be used instead. In order to make this new mechanism operational, the European Commission is going to publish specific reports identifying such distortions in on an economy-wide or specific sector level. EU manufacturers can then refer to these reports in order to determine the basis for complaints and to calculate what the normal reference prices should be.
Research is being conducted in order to assess the degree to which Chinese industries are operating according to competition-based market standards or are subjected to market-distorting governmental interventions.
Markus Taube
Economic Implications of the “Belt and Road Initiative”
Current research
A major impulse for economic development in the Eurasian continent as well as a restructuring of the global division of labour might be created with the unfolding of what has become known as the “One Belt, One Road” or “Belt and Road” initiative. Proposed by Chinese government in 2013 the initiative aims at creating a comprehensive network of transport corridors and an integrated industrial fabric spanning from China via the Middle East and Central Asia to Europe. In the course of this multilateral industrialization programme new regional and multilateral institutions that complement or compete with existing regional/global governance systems can be expected to evolve. Their shape as well as the concrete impact of the potentially emerging new regional value chains on global goods flows, investment activity, local as well as international labour markets, local and supra-national institution building, however, remains undetermined. The disruptive changes brought up by the “Belt and Road” initiative cannot result in a win-win for all parties, but will entail some a reorganization of absolute and relative wealth, income generation possibilities and economic as well as political power projection capacity. New research initiatives are required to better understand the parameters at play and identify potential local/regional/global development patterns.