Categories
Forsk mänskliga rättigheter

New book chapter on democracy promotion in Swedish foreign aid

I’ve published a book chapter on the democracy-promotion aim in Swedish development aid policy. In the chapter, I analyze how Swedish policymakers have framed the aims and strategies of democracy promotion in ODA from the 1960s to the 2010s.

Categories
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.