Cluster of Excellence “Transforming Human Rights” (FAU Erlangen–Nürnberg)

The Chair of African Legal Studies is also affiliated with the Cluster of Excellence Transforming Human Rights at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen–Nürnberg (FAU). Led by the Center for Human Rights Erlangen–Nürnberg (CHREN), this interdisciplinary research initiative investigates how human rights evolve in response to the defining transformations of our time.

The Cluster focuses on five interrelated global megatrends—autocratisation, the fragmentation of economic globalisation, international migration, planetary environmental crises, and digitalisation—examining how these developments both challenge and reshape human rights norms, institutions, and practices. At the same time, it explores how human rights themselves offer tools for responding to these transformations.

In contributing to this initiative, the Chair of African Legal Studies brings in-depth expertise on the application, contestation, and transformation of human rights within African legal and political systems. By combining comparative legal analysis with empirical research from African jurisdictions, the Chair supports the Cluster’s aim of rethinking human rights in an interconnected and rapidly changing world.