Every year, the Bad Homburg Conference provides a public forum for reflection on important contemporary social issues. This year, debate focused on the relationship between law and power in international politics: in view of current wars and conflicts, instruments of power politics such as military force and economic pressure increasingly seem to be replacing the international legal order.
Against this backdrop, on September 19, experts from various disciplines were invited to discuss the role of the international legal order – in particular, the question of how the UN's demand to secure peace through law and outlaw war as a legitimate means of politics can be implemented in the future.
Impulses were provided through presentations by Michael Zürn (Free University of Berlin), Antje Wiener (University of Hamburg), and Thilo Marauhn (Julius Liebig University Giessen, PRIF), who spoke about the function and functioning of international law as an instrument and mode of conflict management in international politics.
In the subsequent panel discussion, Janina Dill (Professor for Global Security at the University of Oxford), Isabelle Ley (representative of the Chair of International Law at Friedrich Schiller University Jena) and Nicole Deitelhoff (Scientific Director and Head of the Research Department on International Institutions at PRIF) exchanged their views on the question of the power and powerlessness of international law. The discussion was moderated by Christopher Daase, Deputy Executive Director and Head of the Research Department on International Security at PRIF.
Summing up the contributions, Christopher Daase, Nicole Deitelhoff, Gunther Hellmann (Goethe University Frankfurt), and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann (Director, Research College for the Humanities) drew a conclusion of the conference.
About the conference:
The Bad Homburg Conference has been held annually since 2017 by the Research College for the Humanities at Goethe University Frankfurt and the city of Bad Homburg v. d. Höhe. This year, it was organized in cooperation with PRIF.
The contributions can be watched on YouTube (in German).
