BTS faculty members participate in a number of research centres. Selected PhD candidates from these research centres will also participate in the PhD programme of the Berlin Graduate School for Transnational Studies. The following research centres are associated with the BTS:
The Research Center 700 (SFB) focuses on the questions:
How can effective and legitimate governance be sustained in areas of limited statehood? What problems emerge under such conditions?
The Center for Area Studies unites the competence existing in different research networks in the humanities and social sciences at Freie Universitaet Berlin into interdisciplinary fields of research and scholarship pertaining to particular geographical or cultural regions.
The Center for European Integration takes on a leading role in research and teaching on European Integration at the Otto-Suhr-Institute for Political Science at the Freie Universität Berlin. The Center has been awarded a Jean Monnet Chair in September 2006.
The diffusion of ideas has become a central research theme in political science, sociology, law, history, and economics. The DFG-Research College will study the role of the EU as the promoter and recipient of ideas, analyzing the mechanisms and effects of internal and external diffusion processes in the three research areas "Identity and the Public Sphere", "Compliance, Conditionality, and Beyond" and "Comparative Regionalism and Europe’s External Relations".
The Center for Transnational Relations, Foreign and Security Policy focuses on theory-guided empirical research of trans- and international relations. The issue areas addressed by the various members of staff and fellows cover global governance, German foreign policy, European security, and transatlantic relations.
The following WZB research units are part of the BTS:
Transnational Conflicts and International Institutions
The research unit, "Transnational Conflicts and International Institutions" (TKI) examines the legalization of international institutions, the transnationalization of international regulation with regard to the Internet, questions concerning the legitimacy of military intervention, and the foundations and impacts of transnational movements. Research activities are guided by the question of how European politics and policy respond to global challenges in the areas of economy, ecology, human rights, and security.
Migration, Integration, Transnationalization
The research programme of the research unit focuses on four dimensions of migration and integration. On the cultural dimension, migration raises the questions of national identity, and - particularly under the influence of Muslim immigration - of state-church relationships. On the social dimension, the roles of social capital and of civil society organizations for the integration of immigrants are at stake. Politically, immigration has brought the category of citizenship again to the centre of attention. Economically, finally, post-war migration to Europe has been a unique experiment of mass immigration in the context of developed welfare states. Whether immigration countries can remain welfare states is an as yet unresolved existential question for European societies.
Democracy: Structures, Performance, Challenges
The unit undertakes research projects on all sub-regimes and problem-dimensions. The projects are located at the interface of external challenges and sub-regimes or at the interface between sub-regimes. They allow an analysis of the political process from the input to the output side in partial sequences of the whole process ranging from challenges to civil rights, participation, elections, accountability, and government to outcomes/outputs.
An overview of research projects currently conducted at the HSoG can be accessed here.