Despite today's widespread mobility and the possibilities of digital networking, human existence is still predominantly spatially situated. Wherever people share their living and living space, they create rules for living together. Even though individualism has apparently increased in the last decades as a social phenomenon, the individual experiences still substantially happen at one’s regular place of residence. Therefore, not only locality but also community matter.

Usually weak statehood occurs where the rule of a state does not threaten to collapse and is fundamentally stable, but it still cannot fulfill all the tasks that would follow its Western pattern. His assertiveness is restricted to a few areas, policies and social groups. The connection between space and community makes local the genuine place of collective self-organization, it is the place where the most independent regulations and regulatory patterns emerge. Hence, local self–organization forms a functional basicity of statehood and at the same time interacts with the forms of this statehood at higher levels.

The workshop aims to identify, describe and debate local self–regulation in different countries, regimes and historical periods. The goal is to analyze the relationship between national and local state regulation and the self–regulatory capacity of local communities. This analysis helps us to understand urban and municipal administration and other civil society forms of self–regulation. Furthermore, how local self–organization influences and is influenced by its interactions with the state level.

Methodologically, institutional theory and the governance approach allow the categorization of various forms of self–organization and the complementary analysis of formal and informal patterns. Historical institutionalism draws attention to the importance of power constellations for the formation and change of institutions – understood not only as state institutions but also as binding rules and social behavioral orientations. Sociological institutionalism has a broad understanding of institutions, that are not only irrevocable rules but also organizations, cultural patterns, symbols and cognitive frames. Both theoretical variants enable a systematically investigation of the characteristics and dynamics of social, economic and political regulatory patterns which constitute themselves informally.

Hereby, a research that allows a different approach and understanding about the concepts of weak statehood, its discoveries and local self–regulation may provide a glance on new solutions to the drawbacks of individualism. Researchers and students from diverse areas of study are welcome, considering that interdisciplinarity is a strong asset to build creative, effective and new solutions.