Both sustainability and transdisciplinary research can change academic research, especially with regard to its relevance for, and relationship with, its environments. Transdisciplinary sustainability research (TSR), thus, offers the opportunity to change non-sustainable development paths of sciences themselves. In order to fully exploit this possibility, this PhD project addresses the question of how TSR, in the first place, does conceptualize and, in the second place, could conceptualize knowledge, research, and science. Firstly, this PhD project analyzes, from a discourse studies perspective, the term problem in TSR, against the background of discourses on sustainable development. Secondly, it explores the historicalanalytical and transformative concept of the problematic. The results, firstly, show the consequences of a problem-solving focus for TSR, and secondly, differentiate it from a transformative direction of problematic designing, as a more appropriate view on the dimensions of transformation and their qualities of change that matter for TSR. This PhD project aims to contribute to a self-understanding of, and a philosophical communication about, TSR, as a research form in the sustainability sciences. Keywords: Discourse studies, problem-solving, transdisciplinary sustainability research, transformative potential, dimensions of transformation.
Since its establishment, the African Union (AU) has assumed an important role in matters of peace and security on the continent. This doctoral dissertation is dedicated to its conflict and crisis interventions and seeks to identify as well as subsequently explain the broader patterns that have emerged. The dissertation posits that neither the AU’s regime-serving roots, which emphasize the primacy of incumbents’ parochial interests, nor the AU’s problem-solving commitment, which emphasizes the pursuit of its declared organizational mission, can convincingly explain these patterns on their own. Instead, we should understand the AU as being driven by two different logics of cooperation at the same time: a problem-solving and a regime-serving logic. Across its three constitutive articles, the dissertation makes empirical as well as theoretical contributions to the existing literature. Empirically, it offers a broad and systematic analysis of AU interventions over time, across different intervention types, and without bias towards high-profile cases. The novel dataset, on which the dissertation builds, constitutes the hitherto most comprehensive effort to capture the AU’s responses to crises and conflicts. Theoretically, the dissertation develops a set of testable theory-driven expectations based on the notion of two different logics of cooperation. While identifiable in the literature on the AU and linking to broader existing debates on international cooperation, the dissertation breaks ground by clearly outlining the implications of each logic and bringing them together under a single theoretical framework. Jointly, the articles provided strong evidence that the AU is indeed driven by both a problem-solving and a regime-serving logic of cooperation, and that this serves as the foundation for explaining the AU’s broader intervention patterns. This contributes not only to a better understanding of AU interventions but also has a chance to enrich other important debates, including the debates on African regionalism, comparative regionalism, and multilateral interventions.