Project team: Lise Rakner (Project leader), Leonardo Arriola, Siri Gloppen , Kendra Dupuy, Vibeke Wang, Fiona Shen-Bayh, Svein-Erik Helle (post-doctoral fellow) and Lisa-Marie Måseidvåg Selvik (PhD candidate). Time frame: 08/01/2017-08/01/2021 Project description: Are dictators abusing formal institutions in a backlash against democracy, or are formal institutions increasingly restraining the discretionary power of more-or-less democratic politicians? Most African […]
Suing the State for climate change is the title for Catalina Vallejo Ph.D project. Vallejo finished her Ph.D.in 2018. About: How are courts around the world holding governments accountable for failing to mitigate or adapt to climate change? Through content analysis of court decisions in cases against governments around the world, the study examines where and how citizens […]
This project examines the population´s values and interpretations of the child´s best interest’s principle within different societies, as well at the courts justifications of their best interest’s judgments. The principle of the child´s best interests is recognized by all states, but it is a principle that is controversial and contested within and between welfare states. […]
The research project “Discretion and the child’s best interests in child protection” aims to unlock the black box of discretionary decision-making in child protection cases by a comparative-empirical study of how discretionary decisions are made and justified in the best interests of the child. There are huge research gaps in this important area of the […]
Political, civil and social rights for citizens are prerequisites for a functioning democracy. Furthermore, legal developments in various areas of the welfare state have important implications for the construction of ‘social citizenship’, i.e. the institutional framework which ideally, should ensure citizens’ opportunities to participate in society as equal and free citizens. The focus of the research […]
Yngvild Gotaas Torvik has submitted her master thesis on queer asylum, titled “Safeguarding borders, or safeguarding queers – Norwegian perceptions of (in)credible LGBT asylum seekers at the intersection of ‘LGBT friendly’ norms and restrictionalist immigration policies”. This was written as part of the research project Sexual and Reproductive Rights Lawfare: Global battles. The thesis explores […]
PhD Project for Anna Gopsill The research project aims to analyse the use of wartime sexual violence against men (SVAM) as a politicised weapon of war in Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992-1995) and Rwanda (1994). By tracing verdicts from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), the project […]
Sara Ekblom has written her master’s thesis in law (UiB) on the right to water in investor-State arbitration. The thesis asks how investor-State Tribunals addresses the relationship between the Argentine Governments’ international duty to realize the human right to affordable drinking water through regulation and policy, and its international duty to accord foreign investors in […]
Masters project: Ruben Berge Mathisen (Comparative Politics, UiB), submitted 2018 This thesis advances a modified version of Inglehart’s Postmaterialist thesis as an explanation for homophobia in Africa. My argument is that economic development substantially contributes to creating a Postmaterialist public culture – part of which is tolerance for homosexuality – when triggering three mechanisms: a) […]
Masters project for Artur Rubinat (Department of Administration and Organization Theory at UiB) My master thesis reads Community Policing as Social Innovation. In the Police service this means to link democratic governance mechanisms (citizen and community participation), with meeting security needs to produce social change. I study the Local Police reforms in the cities of […]
Breaking BAD: Understanding the Backlash Against Democracy in Africa
