The Untold Story of the Paris Principles

I was recently invited by the Berkeley Comparative Equality & Anti-Discrimination Law Study Group to give a keynote on the Paris Principles.  I appreciated the opportunity to reflect on a set of norms which have inspired a lot of my academic research!  Instead of offering a summary of recent work on national human rights institutions (NHRIs) effectiveness, I thought instead that I’d offer a more personal account of the individuals that have been instrumental to the remarkable diffusion of these standards and their often faithful instantiation in structures around the world.  Although the story of NHRI diffusion has been well-documented elsewhere, the role of individual norm entrepreneurs in this story is not well-understood. Continue reading The Untold Story of the Paris Principles

ISA 2018 Roundtable on Global Governance

Last month I hosted a roundtable at the International Studies Association Conference 2018 in San Francisco. We had a brilliant group of participants to take stock of recent rapid developments in global governance scholarship.

Continue reading ISA 2018 Roundtable on Global Governance

Global Policy Special Issue on Global Governance

David Coen and I have convened a new Special Section in the journal Global Policy (Volume 9, Issue 1), featuring contributions from pioneering thinkers in global governance, working across theoretical, analytical and issue-area boundaries. Reflecting upon the distance travelled by global governance research in recent years, the collection aims to identify promising lines of future inquiry and galvanise further scholarly innovation into how, ultimately, collective action can be achieved on an unprecedented scale to respond to the most pressing global policy challenges of our time.  Continue reading Global Policy Special Issue on Global Governance

The Tradecraft of Human Rights Politics

Talk given at Leuven University (29 June 2017):

By way of preface, I’d like to echo Philip Alston in his LSE Human Rights Day lecture last year, that the human rights community is entering a watershed moment.  We have a President of the US and the Philippines who openly support torture and killing with impunity.  Civil society faces a major global crackdown.  Unfettered capitalism is multiplying human rights and environmental crises.  But to sound a slightly less gloomy note, this does not amount to the end times or the twilight of human rights. Continue reading The Tradecraft of Human Rights Politics