Research team
Expertise
My expertise pertains to international law - with particular focus on the (evolving) sources and (diversifying) participants of international law -, international human rights law, and human rights more generally as values, norms and practices adopted, interpreted and used by different communities in society. In my research, I employ both classical doctrinal legal methodology as well as empirical social science methods, especially in the form of qualitative social-constructivist research. My research past and present has particularly focused on actors other than the state: At the start of my postgraduate studies, I studied non-state armed groups and their relationship with international human rights law, international criminal law, humanitarian law and jus ad bellum (the law concerning the initiation of armed conflict, including especially the right to self-defence). Later, during my PhD, I explored local governments' engagement with human rights in the field of migration, including how they adopt human rights-realising practices locally and how they contribute to the interpretation and development of international norms and policies in the field. Here, I also developed a deeper understanding of how individuals and institutions are 'socialised' i.e. how they come to take adopt and take ownership of certain norms and practices, and how they then develop their own understandings of these norms and practices to then disseminate and advocate towards other actors. Now, as a post-doctoral researcher in the iBOF project "Future-Proofing Human Rights: Developing Thicker Accountability" I explore questions such "What constitutes the essence of a human rights duty?" "What can qualify as a human rights duty?" "Who can be considered human rights duty-bearers?" and "What concepts and mechanisms can we learn and use from other legal fields in order to strengthen human rights accountability for a broader, more comprehensive range of human rights duty-bearers?" As part of this research I look at different legal fields and how duties of different actors (such as the International Olympics Committee in Sports Law or companies in International Investment Law) are identified and enforced.