Miia Halme-Tuomisaari
Research Associate, Global Governance Centre

Miia Halme-Tuomisaari is Associate Professor in Human Rights Studies at Lund University. An anthropologist trained in critical international law, her work engages with the post-World War II human rights phenomenon and the international order, contributing to debates in the anthropology of international organizations, law, bureaucracy, documents and expertise. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork at the UN Human Rights Committee, within human rights expert networks, CSOs and the Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She is also a specialist in the history of human rights, having carried out archival research on lobbying efforts for the UDHR in the 1940s. Throughout her career, she has been worked to increase the societal visibility of scholarship and to develop innovative new publication formats, including co-founding the online publication allegralaboratory.net. She is currently Vice-Chair of TUTKAS, the society of Finnish MPs and researchers affiliated with the Finnish Parliament. She has previously held research positions at the University of Helsinki, the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, the Helsinki Collegium of Advanced Studies, and has delivered visiting lectures and invited talks at numerous universities across Europe. She has published widely in leading international journals. Her books include Human Rights in Action: Learning Expert Knowledge (Brill 2010), Revisiting the Origins of Human Rights (CUP 2015, co-ed with Pamela Slotte), and Movement in the Rights Direction: An Ethnography of the UN Human Rights Committee (University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming). She is currently finalizing the monograph Looping for Human Right: An Ethnographic Theory of Expansion, utilizing LGBTIQ+ as its case study.