Intro

The Käte Hamburger Kolleg/Centre for Global Cooperation Research (KHK/GCR21) is a central scientific institution and one of currently fifteen research centres of the UDE. As an interdisciplinary centre for global cooperation research, it is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) for a further six years (2018–2024) within the funding initiative “Freiraum für die Geisteswissenschaften” (“Freedom for the Humanities”) following successful evaluation in 2017. The central element of this funding is the fellowship programme, which invites ten international guest researchers and their individual research projects to the UDE for up to 12 months each year. 

Research at the Centre focuses on the core tasks of exploring the opportunities and obs­tacles with respect to cross-border cooperation, a better understanding of actors, structures and mechanisms, and identifying condition and success factors for functioning, sustainable, modes of global governance. In the first funding phase of the Centre (2012–2018), researchers from various disciplines and all regions of the world developed new approaches to modern cooperation research to identify new ways of global policy-making for crisis management and the protection of global common goods. In the first three years of the current funding phase (2018–2024), the research programme focuses not only on polycentric governance and pathways and mechanisms of global cooperation but also on concrete policy fields such as governance of migration, climate, peacebuilding and the Internet.