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Forsk mänskliga rättigheter Statsveteri

New article on legal mobilisation in Scandinavia

Why have civil society groups in Scandinavia increasingly turned to legal mobilization in recent decades? In a recent article, Malcolm Langford (University of Oslo), Mikael Rask Madsen (University of Copenhagen) and I seek to account for how various actors in civil society in Denmark, Norway and Sweden have pursued societal change by using courts as political arenas.

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Forsk

New paper on Sweden and international human rights

I’ve recently published the article “The Self-Exempting Activist: Sweden and the International Human Rights Regime” in the Nordic Journal of Human Rights, 38(1), 2020.

Here’s the abstract:

This article seeks to account for Sweden’s evolving commitment to the international human rights (HR) regime since its inception in the late 1940s. Where previous research has explained Nordic HR exceptionalism in terms of values of solidarity and democracy in domestic society, this article instead develops a rationalist framework focusing on how governments assess the sovereignty costs states incur through their international HR commitments – costs which may increase as the international regime accretes authority and domestic groups gain opportunities for mobilising for compliance. Empirically, the article adopts a longitudinal approach to determine how Swedish governments have committed to international human rights norms in three historical episodes: the emergence of the European Convention on Human Rights; the era of international activism from the 1960s, and the domestication of international human rights law since the 1980s.

Categories
mänskliga rättigheter Statsveteri

CFP: Exporting Nordic goodness: Critical perspectives on the ‘humanitarian superpowers’

Here’s another opportunity to take a critical look at Nordic claims to foreign policy exceptionalism: Together with Sunniva Engh and Kristian Bjørkdahl, I’m convening a panel at the Development Research Conference in Gothenburg on 22–23 August 2018.