Research project “Transforming Human Rights” at FAU becomes Cluster of Excellence – the MPI congratulates its cooperation partner
The research project “Transforming Human Rights,” based at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU), will become a Cluster of Excellence as part of the Excellence Initiative of the German federal and state governments. This was announced late Thursday afternoon by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Science Council (WR). The Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology is a cooperation partner in this project and congratulates FAU on this outstanding success.
The Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology congratulates co-speakers Markus Krajewski, Katrin Kinzelbach and the dedicated team of researchers at FAU, whose contemporary proposal impressed the DFG review board and resulted in the approval of funding for the new Cluster of Excellence “Transforming Human Rights” yesterday. We are delighted about this success and look forward to even closer cooperation with FAU in the future.
This collaboration has a long history and goes back to the dedicated work of the Department ‘Law & Anthropology’. Dominik Müller worked there from 2016 to 2019 as a Head of Research Group with his Emmy Noether project “The Bureaucratization of Islam and its Socio-Legal Dimensions in Southeast Asia,” and since 2023, the Department has been providing sustained support to the Max Planck Fellow Group “JUST MIGRATION: Labour Migration Regimes in transnationalised contexts,” led by Anuscheh Farahat. Together with Katrin Kinzelbach, the two already play an important role in the International Max Planck Research School “Global Multiplicity.” This collaboration will now be further intensified within the framework of the Cluster of Excellence.
The Excellence Strategy of the German federal and state governments is one of the most important initiatives for promoting outstanding research in Germany. The multi-year funding allows interdisciplinary teams to pursue a joint research agenda, provide extensive support to early-career researchers, and collaborate internationally. In terms of content, the Cluster of Excellence at FAU is dedicated to the potential and limits of human rights against the backdrop of fundamental changes shaping our time. The focus is on five ‘megatrends’: autocratization, the fragmentation of economic globalization, international migration, planetary environmental crises, and digitalization.