This International Relations Working Group session features a presentation by Dr. Alvina Hoffmann (SOAS University of London) who will present a draft chapter of her book manuscript on human rights elites at the United Nations.
The book manuscript analyses how independent human rights experts at the UN have become ‘spokespersons of the universal’ to offer a new perspective on the emergence, implementation and practices of international human rights. The UN human rights architecture provides actors with access to formulate human rights through the idiom of the universal. It is normally understood as a principle of international law and the UN as an international organisation, a general good which applies to all, and a claim that transcends state boundaries. By asking instead whose voices carry the power to speak for the universal, the book shifts a common institutional and legal focus towards the power of spokespersons to embody human rights claims which they seek to universalise across local, state and institutional boundaries.
The book follows the biographical and professional trajectories of UN experts in special human rights missions. The chapter I will present focuses on Felix Ermacora, an Austrian human rights expert, international lawyer and delegate to the UN human rights commission who served for 27 years on various human rights fact-finding missions at the UN, such as the first one one apartheid in South Africa, followed by the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Chile and Afghanistan. The chapter relies on his travelogues and interviews with his widow and a former student, as well as archival sources from the UN to retrace the emergence of an expert on international human rights law. It highlights the tensions between state diplomacy and experts, headquarters and being in the field, bureaucracy and adventure, and a sense of futility and deep belief in the cause.
Speaker: Alvina Hoffmann is a Lecturer in Diplomatic Studies at SOAS University of London. Her research and teaching interests are in human rights and humanitarianism, the sociology of elites and experts, transnational professionals, socio-legal studies and the UN. Currently, she is working on her first monograph titled Speaking for the Universal: Human Rights Elites in World Politics. Her research has recently appeared in the Review of International Studies, European Journal of International Relations, and Global Studies Quarterly.
The Zoom link will be sent upon registration.