Cluster of Excellence “Transforming Human Rights”

The promise of human rights to protect people everywhere from abuses and injustices and to enable them to live in equal dignity remains unfulfilled for most of the world’s population despite the growth of human rights instruments, institutions, and organizations.

Furthermore, skepticism in academic discourses and the open rejection of human rights by many states and political actors are on the rise. The Cluster of Excellence Transforming Human Rights therefore seeks to revisit the potential of human rights as a universalistic framework for addressing fundamental changes that shape our times in political, economic, social, ecological, and technological contexts.

Shedding light on the potential and limitations of human rights

To achieve this goal, we will describe, analyze, and assess how five megatrends, namely autocratization, fragmented economic globalization, international migration, planetary environmental crises, and digitalization, are transforming human rights, and how in turn human rights can and should transform responses to the megatrends. We also seek to understand the ways in which these transformations challenge human rights theory, and invite us to rethink fundamental normative claims about human rights.

We will operationalize our research through three central dimensions of human rights norms: rights-holders and duty-bearers of human rights (Who?); content and scope of human rights obligations (What?); and modes of realization and accountability (How?). The Cluster’s approach rests on an understanding of human rights that draws on legal, social scientific, and philosophical perspectives.

We will therefore pursue multi- and interdisciplinary research as well as transdisciplinary approaches involving practitioners in order to innovate human rights scholarship. We will engage in empirical, conceptual, and normative analyses of human rights transformations.

Interdisciplinary research

To this end, the Cluster will establish an exceptionally inspiring, diverse, and inclusive research space for human rights in Nuremberg, a “City of Peace and Human Rights,” whose extensive human rights activities have been developed as a conscious reaction to the 20th-century atrocities that led to the construction of today’s international system for human rights protection. The Cluster will be hosted by FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, the only university in Germany with an established institutional focus on human rights. Over the past fifteen years,

FAU has made continuous strategic investments to advance this important field, including by creating new professorships. Based on this, the unique multidisciplinary group of scholars applying for this Cluster will elevate human rights research at FAU to the next level, create outstanding programs for early-career researchers and international fellows, and thus shape the university’s overall profile. Together with four participating institutions in Germany, fifteen international partners, and ten esteemed members in our advisory board, we will reimagine and strengthen human rights research at a critical time.

Starting on 1 January 2026, the Cluster of Excellence is funded for seven years by the German Research Foundation (DFG) as part of the Excellence Strategy of the Federal Government and the States.

Image: FAU/Giulia Iannicelli.