Global Constitutionalism and the Internet

The Global Constitutionalism and the Internet research group focuses on new legal and institutional approaches to transnational and global governance for a digital society. The group aims at translating widely accepted constitutional principles such as human dignity, fundamental rights and freedoms, democracy and participation, separation of powers and the rule of law into specific institutional arrangements that can claim legitimacy on different political levels.

In view of the increasing need for effective regulation of the internet as a global infrastructure for communication and control – i.e. for regulation beyond the state, not limited to but especially in the areas of the environment, security and trade – the group is seeking new approaches to the legal construction of processes and institutions in which human rights and democratic legitimation form the basis for a normative framework for the various forms of governance.

Global constitutionalism is to be understood as a normative theory that places the individual, not state structures, at its centre and sees generally accepted constitutional principles such as human dignity, freedom and equality rights, democracy and participation, the separation of powers and the rule of law as inviolable values in the increasingly dense world of politics. Relations between people at the global level and the legal framework will be explored. The aim is to “translate” these principles into democratic legitimised decision-making processes at the various political levels. The internet could play a significant role in this. This potential needs to be explored – but so do the risks associated with the use of information technologies – in order to understand the necessary normative consequences.

Global Constitutionalism and the Internet

In the Global Constitutionalism and the Internet research group, we investigate how technologies contribute to the formation of norms beyond the state and deal with the question of how these processes can be reconstructed from the perspective of constitutionalism theories. We address questions from the fields of data protection, cyber security and public administration that extend beyond their application cases from a both a transdisciplinary  and a legal point of view. We focus in particular on the following questions:

	The individual Can we think of different orders from the individual? What shifts result if we focus on the individual in the governance of the Internet or the reform of administration?
	Global negotiation process How are the new global orders that will shape life in the world being negotiated? How does unity and diversity emerge in areas such as data protection or IT and cyber security?
	Digital constitution What does a constitution mean in a “digital constellation”? What are the principles behind digital technologies such as the Internet?