Cosmopolitan Turn and Democratic Sentiments
The CONSENT-project will study the children’s rights situation in Norway and Romania. All children possess rights as declared in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). The CONSENT research project will empirically examine the extent to which the CRC is considered to be relevant in democratic assemblies and legal regulations, if […]
Women on the Bench: The Role of Female Judges in Fragile States
Since the 1970s, women have increasingly made it to the bench. Surprisingly, the proportion of women judges is generally higher in post-conflict countries than in well-established western democracies. Why is this so? Situations of political rupture generally create new opportunity structures; some may favour the entry of women into public positions of power. Post-conflict assistance […]
LawTransform: Effects of Rights & Law
The project aims to consolidate the Centre on Law & Social Transformation (LawTransform) as a leading hub for scholarship on the use of law as an instrument of social change, and to advance high-quality research-based education in this field in Norway and abroad. Background and purpose: Our project brings together an interdisciplinary team of scholars […]
We are a group at the University of Bergen that conduct research on children´s rights. Pro Bono is a Latin phrase for professional work and research undertaken voluntarily without payment and for the benefit of the public good. We believe that working for children and young individual’s rights is a particularly important social responsibility. In […]
Elevating water rights to human rights: Has it strengthened marginalized peoples’ claim for water?
Abstract: Water scarcity remains a huge problem in many countries, especially where a growing population compete with demands for water from industry and agriculture. In 2010, a United Nations General Assembly resolution recognised the right to safe and clean drinking water as a human right. However, the actual impact of this relatively new human right to […]
WAIT – Waiting for an uncertain future: the temporalities of irregular migration
The Project The WAIT-project focuses on the temporal aspects of migration and investigates how temporal structures related to irregular migration are shaped by legal regimes, cultural norms and power relationships, and how they shape subjective experiences and life projects. The WAIT-project aims to produce knowledge that meets societal challenges raised by new migration patterns adds […]
Why is homosexuality (encompassing lesbian, gay, bi, trans*/LGBT) more politicized and criminalized in Africa than elsewhere? Can similar politicization of abortion be prevented? And what are the health impacts? This project analyses LGBT and abortion politics in ten African countries: Sudan, Tunisia, Senegal, Malawi, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Mozambique, Zambia and South Africa. Development actors have […]
Sexual and Reproductive Rights (SRR) are controversial in most societies. Political polarization has been particularly pronounced on to abortion rights and rights of sexual minorities (LGBTIQ – lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer – persons), but is also evident in issues such as the regulation of contraception, sterilization and adultery, divorce, sexual education and stem […]
Advisory board: Daniel Brinks, Aninka Claassens, Duncan Kennedy and Alf Gunvald Nilsen. The PluriLand project aims to develop a theory of land rights claiming in plural legal regimes through cross-regional investigation of conflicts over land affecting the land rights of vulnerable communities. Despite the protection of indigenous, traditional and/or communal land rights in many legal […]
Legitimacy challenges
The premise for the LEGITIMACY project is that the mobilization against the Norwegian child protection system is but one piece in a larger picture about mistrust in governments, politicians and the understanding of social and political movements in modern societies. LEGITIMACY is an ambitious project that will employ several innovative methodological approaches, multi-level and cross-country […]