Human Rights Master’s Thesis Award

The winner of Human Rights Thesis Award 2024 was Zoe Sigman, MPP 2024, for her thesis titled "Migrant Deaths on the United States-Mexico Border, 2014-2017. A Multiple Systems Estimation Approach",  supervised by Julian Wucherpfennig, Professor of International Affairs and Security at the Hertie School. Zoe’s thesis investigates how state policies contribute to migrant mortality and analyses data from four independent organisations to account for the true number of migrant deaths along the US-Mexico border. By applying a novel and innovative statistical approach, she finds that official sources significantly undercount deaths along the border, estimating the true number of deaths to be 35-61% higher than previously reported figures.  In its consideration the committee noted that the thesis is of exceptional quality and makes an excellent contribution to human rights scholarship, both on a substantive and methodological dimension, by demonstrating how forensic data infrastructure can be used to highlight the terrible human costs of border policies.  Sigman’s work thus does not only speak to an urgent and pressing human rights problem but also examines it from a highly interdisciplinary perspective, combining statistical inference with a deep understanding of migration law and policy. She concludes with a range of concrete policy proposals that can be used to improve data collection and standardisation in migration as well as to create better governmental border enforcement policies to prevent migrant deaths.

The Committee also awarded an honourable mention to Kasyoka P. Mutunga, MIA 2024, for her thesis “The International Monetary Fund’s Conditionality Regime: A Cautionary Tale on the Pitfalls of Human Rights Mainstreaming” supervised by Başak Çalı, Professor of International Law at the Hertie School. She comprehensively investigates whether the IMF’s new strategy aimed at centring human rights concerns leads to changes in its lending regime. Her thesis is focused on a deep single case study of the IMF’s conditionality measures vis-à-vis Kenya from 1988 to today. Her detailed work demonstrates the absence of any substantial impact of the respective human rights strategy on lending, offering a highly critical analyses of the potentials and limitations of human rights mainstreaming in financial institutions.

The winner of the inaugural Human Rights Thesis Award 2023 was Claire Heydacker, MIA 2023, for her thesis “The Melting Point of Ice: The Paris Agreement’s Human Rights Obligation and Its Subsequent Implementation in the Nationally Determined Contributions of Arctic Actor States”, supervised by Başak Çalı, Professor of International Law at the Hertie School. Claire's thesis examines whether and how member states of the Arctic Council, as well as the self-proclaimed Near-Arctic state China, address the impact of climate change on Arctic communities. The evaluation committee commended the thesis for demonstrating an excellent grasp of emerging human rights and climate change scholarship, as well as for developing independent policy recommendations to enhance the protection of human rights in the face of climate catastrophe.

The Committee also awarded an honourable mention to Homyra Rahnoma, MIA 2023, for her thesis entitled “Does Government Ineffectiveness and Illegitimacy Lead to Migration?” supervised by Shubha Prasad, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Hertie School. Homyra’s thesis is based on extensive field work and interviews with Afghan communities in Turkey. At that time, the Centre for Fundamental Rights’ awarding committee underlined the accomplished nature of Homyra’s work, which not only “shine[s] a light on the situation of Afghan refugees, but also advances our understanding of how migration, government quality, and human rights intersect”.