The Justice & Governance Cluster seeks to invest in research and subsequent dissemination of information and knowledge on the ways norms concerning minority protection are set up, translated into practice and interpreted in the course of this translation.

The Cluster opts for the topics which still have significant gaps and deficiencies in the research already done. The projects selected must combine academic novelty with practical significance.

The backbone theoretical issues to be addressed are:

• Relationships between different ways to conceptualize diversity
• Limits of applicability for minority protection
• Relationships between discourses and human behavior in terms of making and implementing decisions
• Symbolic policies versus instrumental policies
• Symbolic production - generation of meanings and values.

Contemporary minority rights context

At the same time as issues of norm diffusion and convergence have come to the fore at the macro level with the EU taking a greater role in Europe’s normative regime, aspects of legitimacy and responsibility of protection schemes come to the fore as these are interpreted at the local and regional levels.

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Public administration capacity is ever more topical. This comes with the change in attention from standard setting to operationalization of minority rights. Governance requires translation of standards through policy design, programme development, knowledge transfer and capacity building as well as monitoring through indicators, targets and benchmarking.

Analytical categories

Minority protection and related notions are categories of practice employed for adjusting nation-building to cultural heterogeneity and vice versa. Taken as categories of analysis they are highly problematic and have a limited applicability.

Despite recent achievements in minority protection standard setting, institutional development still rests on a combination of loose ideas open to different interpretations. Correspondingly, the ways they are translated into practice vary significantly. Moreover, ideas under the headline of minority protection can be abused and misused in some circumstances.

This is the complexity that inspires the work of the Justice & Governance Cluster.