Research project

Dynamics of Resilience: Regional Human Rights Regimes in Times of Backlash

About the project

This project explores how the institutional ecosystem of regional human rights courts can support courts in a situation of attack. Building on the classic work of Albert O. Hirschmann, it provides an innovative comparative analysis of the challenges and adaptations of regional human rights institutions from two distinct conceptual vantage points: backlash and resilience. The project adopts an interdisciplinary and qualitative approach from a comparative perspective. It focuses on the European and Inter-American human rights regimes from the 1990s to 2022 with the aim of identifying both commonalities and differences in their institutional response to backlash. The thesis combines different methodological tools such as doctrinal analysis, process tracing, and semi-structured expert interviews to trace the development of exit procedures, reform processes, and changing communication strategies. Originally conceived as a PhD project at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, the thesis was awarded the prestigious Werner Pünder Preis 2024 by the Goethe University Frankfurt. The book manuscript is currently pending with an internationally renowned publisher.

Researcher