Concepts in International Organizations

Background

In the last decades, the United Nations has increasingly attracted research interest from various key disciplines: International Relations, International Law, and Economics. In default of a common, interdisciplinary ground of knowledge, each discipline approaches the UN drawing on distinctive terminologies, theories and methodologies.

Within a growing global community of researchers that aim at promoting UN Studies as an integrative field of studies in its own right, researchers are well aware that sharing knowledge and terminology across different disciplines bears great potential for synergies and epistemic development. Yet, there is still a long way to go in order to build a common foundation of knowledge and communication.

That is, why Julia Harfensteller, Dipl.-Pol. and Co-Chair of the UN Studies Association (UNSA) reported about the role and potential of concepts in international organizations.

Aim

By doing so, she intended to contribute to building a common ground of scholarly understanding, focusing on concepts in UN research. Engaging researchers from various disciplines, UN practitioners and terminology experts in a joint discussion, the goal was to identify and compare concepts that are applied across disciplines, including specific terminologies.

In her presentation Julia Harfensteller in particular referred to the following Key Questions:

• What concepts are applied to study the UN across disciplines?
• What are differences in terms of notions, basic views of the UN, and terminology?
• How can terminological discrepancies be overcome?

For more details please see the full presentation of Julia Harfensteller.

Download the presentation here.