Dear Reader Our Centre is three years old and so we find ourselves at the half-way point in our first funding-phase. This occasion, like our forthcoming Midterm Conference in July this year, offers an opportunity for both retrospective and prospective reflection. In the course of these first three years, we have managed, with and through our visiting academics, to bring into being an impressive research-community, which has embraced scholars from across all continents, representing twenty-three nationalities and nine academic disciplines. Reflecting their diverse academic and regional backgrounds, these scholars have adopted a variety of approaches to the Centre’s core task: to explore the potential for global cooperation, and the limits to it, by studying the new orders and structures of governance currently emerging in society and the cultural premises and dynamics that underlie them. We aim to go beyond a general consideration of our core research-theme and include in our focus the new dynamics that have become apparent in recent years – Russia’s new imperial stance, for example, and the emergence of ‘transnational models’ (such as the Islamic State) which are completely outpacing the nation-state. Besides this, however, we have explicitly set ourselves the task of enhancing our role as a platform for active, global cross-linkage with relevant research institutions and consultative bodies all over the world. By doing this, we aim to foster the development of a line of research that brings together challenging questions on cooperation from a variety of academic domains. We warmly invite you to let the following pages fire your imagination and motivate you to get involved in the quest to expand our platform. We wish you an inspiring read! Markus Böckenförde Tobias Debiel Claus Leggewie Dirk Messner