Visiting Fellow, Global Governance Centre
Jenniina Kotajoki is a PhD researcher at the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University, specializing in the roles of international organizations in conflict-affected contexts, community engagement and armed groups. Her dissertation project investigates the interactions between non-state armed groups and the United Nations. Previously, Jenniina was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University and she has contributed to evidence-based policies and practices in the humanitarian and peacebuilding sectors by working with different non-governmental and international organisations. Her research has been published among others at International Studies Review and Third World Quarterly.
Visiting Fellow, Global Governance Centre
Visiting Fellow, Global Governance Centre
James White is a PhD candidate in Architecture at the University of Edinburgh, and Junior Visiting Fellow at IHEID. His PhD research focuses on the evolution and application of the UNESCO World Heritage system to historic urban sites at risk. His research interests include Global Climate Change mitigation and response, local and international governance, and the role of international organizations in promoting dynamic, best-practice environmental policies applicable to historic urban contexts, with a particular focus on the concept of "authenticity".
Research Associate, Global Governance Centre
Fanny Badache is a postdoctoral researcher in the project “A child of its time: The impact of world politics on UN peacebuilding” with the Graduate Institute's Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding (CCDP). Between 2015 and 2020, she was a teaching assistant and PhD candidate in political science at the University of Lausanne. During the academic year 2018-2019, she was a visiting fellow at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies of the Graduate Center at the City University of New York (funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation). Her research interests lie at the intersection between international relations and public administration. She specialized in the study of international bureaucracies. In her PhD dissertation, she studied the impact of staff diversity on the performance and perceived legitimacy of the UN Secretariat. She is also interested in methods to research international organizations and a strong advocate for cross-disciplinary dialogue.
Research Associate
Dr. Julia Bethwaite is a Postdoctoral Researcher in International Relations at the Faculty of Management and Business, Tampere University. Her research interests cover art in international relations and world politics, international political economy of art, power, spatiality, informal global governance, transcalar elite networks, practices of cultural diplomacy and international cultural relations. In her article-based doctoral dissertation, she analysed power in the transnational field of art by focusing on ‘Russian’ actors and artistic sites that were located beyond Russia’s territorial borders, and showed how the Russian state and elite accumulated and converted capital and power in and through art and international/transnational scale.
Postdoctoral Researcher
Erna Burai is Postdoctoral Researcher in the “To Save and to Defend: Global Normative Ambiguity and Regional Order” project, where she covers African regional and sub-regional organizations. A graduate of Central European University (CEU), Erna is an IR theorist with an expertise in norm research in the context of humanitarian interventions and the responsibility to protect. Before joining the Graduate Institute, she held visiting fellowships at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, the Montreal Centre for International Studies (CÉRIUM) and the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) at the University College London. She was also part of the international research project Global Norm Evolution & the Responsibility to Protect, and led an International Relations program at a Hungarian higher education institution.
Postdoctoral Researcher
Sara (Meg) Davis is principal investigator of a multi-country participatory action research project on digital health and human rights, and special advisor on strategy and partnerships at the Global Health Centre. Seh has twenty years’ experience in global health and human rights as a scholar and practitioner. She earned her PhD at the University of Pennsylvania, and held postdoctoral fellowships at Yale University and UCLA. She was China researcher at Human Rights Watch, and founding executive director of Asia Catalyst. At the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, Dr. Davis led early work to operationalise the Fund's commitments on human rights. She has held visiting fellowships at New York University, Columbia University, and Fordham University. She has taught at the Geneva Centre for Humanitarian Studies, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Temple University, Yale University, and University of Pennsylvania; and has consulted for UN agencies, Global Fund Board delegations, and civil society networks.
Senior Research Associate, Global Governance Centre.
Janelle Diller has served as legal counsel since 1998 for the International Labour Organization where she was appointed Deputy Legal Adviser in 2008. She has contributed to the development of international labour standards, soft law principles on business responsibility, and multi-stakeholder initiatives. She was closely involved in the Rana Plaza Arrangement to compensate several thousand worker victims of a factory collapse in Bangladesh. Her expertise includes international organizations, human and labour rights, international law, and governance related to transnational business. Her recent publications focus on human rights due diligence in migration governance and on the impact of multi-stakeholder governance in transnational regulatory contexts on labour law and worker rights. Her current work involves the interaction of multistakeholder initiatives for transnational governance and international organizational orders, and the fragmentation of international law-making in the governance of business and human and labour rights.
Research Associate, Global Governance Centre.
Thomas Gidney completed his PhD in International History at the Graduate Institute. His thesis examines how British colonies were admitted as member states to the League of Nations and the politics behind why only Britain decided to “represent” its colonies internationally. He is currently converting this thesis into a book. Thomas is currently working on a SNF project on the politics of juridical extraterritoriality during the 'Interwar' period, and Is also working with the universities of Oxford and Exeter on a project on the history of aid organisations and their legitimacy.
Research Associate, Global Governance Centre.
Damien Greder is a PhD candidate in the International Relations & Political Science department and a Doctoral Researcher for the Future of Humanitarian Design (HUD) at The Geneva School of Art and Design HEAD – Genève (HES-SO). His research interests lie at the intersection of environmental resilience, architecture, and co-design. He holds a Master of Science in Architecture from the Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ).
Research Associate, Global Governance Centre
Miia Halme-Tuomisaari is Associate Professor in Human Rights Studies at Lund University. A legal anthropologist by her background, she has done ethnographic fieldwork at the UN Human Rights Committee and the Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She has also conducted archival research on the International League for the Rights of Man in the 1940s. Her publications include Human Rights in Action: Learning Expert Knowledge (Brill 2010) and Revisiting the Origins of Human Rights (CUP 2015, co-ed with Pamela Slotte). She is currently writing a monograph on her work at the Human Rights Committee.
Post-doctoral researcher at the Center for International Studies (CERI)
Zuzana Hudáková is a post-doctoral researcher at the Center for International Studies (CERI) at SciencesPo, Paris and a research affiliate at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. Her research focuses on (1) the politics of contestation and everyday resistance in authoritarian regimes in a cross-regional perspective and (2) the use and effectiveness of United Nations sanctions.
Research Associate
Yifan Jia is a Research Associate at the Global Governance Centre. She is a PhD candidate and visiting lecturer at the Dickson Poon School of Law at King's College London. She also teaches at the Department of Political Economy and the Department of War Studies, and researches at the Transnational Law Institute at King's. Yifan Jia's research project is a social-legal study on the Global Human Rights Sanctions Regimes, which combines doctrinal analysis with empirical methods to explore the legitimacy and effectiveness of the Magnitsky sanctions. She is a qualified lawyer in the People’s Republic of China and practised criminal law in Beijing before joining King's.
Research Associate, Global Governance Centre
Flavia Keller is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of Lausanne. As part of her work in a research project on Switzerland’s membership in the UN Security Council, she explores the everyday diplomatic practices of elected members. In her dissertation, she examines the role of materiality and (digital) technology in multilateral diplomacy using ethnographic methods. Flavia Keller holds a master’s degree from the Geneva Graduate
Institute.
Postdoctoral Researcher
Noémie Laurens is a postdoctoral researcher at the Geneva Graduate Institute. She completed her PhD in political science at Université Laval. Previously, she obtained a joint Master’s degree in Management and business law from HEC Paris and Université Paris I, and a Master’s degree in environmental economics from Université de Bordeaux. Her mixed-method doctoral thesis deals with when, why, and how international environmental agreements evolve over time. Her research interests more broadly include environmental governance, trade-environment politics, institutional change, and institutional design.
Visiting Fellow, Global Governance Centre
Tania Messell a Postdoctoral Researcher in the SNSF Sinergia project Governing Through Design (2020-2024). Over the next twelve months she will be furthering her investigations on design, humanitarian aid and resilience thinking as a Visiting Research Fellow at the Global Governance Centre. Her research interests cover global, international and transnational histories of design, the past and current role of innovation and design in humanitarian aid and international development, and the rise of infrastructures of resilience. Author of several peer-reviewed publications, she is also the co-editor of International Design Organisations: Histories, Legacies, Values published by Bloomsbury (2022).
Research Associate, Global Governance Centre
Tomáš Morochovič is a SNSF Postdoc.Mobility Fellow at the Edinburgh Law School, University of Edinburgh and a Research Associate at the Global Governance Centre, Geneva Graduate Institute. In his current research project, titled ‘Decoding De-Legalisation: Translations of International Law in Global Governance’, Tomáš explores processes through which norms originating within international law are translated into private mechanisms of transnational governance. Combining theoretical work with qualitative socio-legal research, the project queries the impact of such translation processes on international law as a normative system. He is an associate editor at the Journal of International Dispute Settlement. Tomáš holds a Ph.D. in International Law (summa cum laude) from the Geneva Graduate Institute, LL.M. in International Human Rights Law from the University of Exeter, and LL.B. in Law from King’s College London. His research interests are primarily in transnational legal theory and the dynamics of human rights protection in a globalised context.
Research Associate, Global Governance Centre
Svitlana Ovcharenko is Research Associate at the Global Governance Center since November 2022, following a fellowship in the International Relations and Political Science Department. She is the author of the concept of “another rationality” and her research uses a multidisciplinary methodology. She focuses on implementing general theoretical knowledge from the philosophy of culture, aesthetics, and ethics in political and governance practices.
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Potsdam
Nina Reiners is Associate Professor for Human Rights and Social Sciences at the University of Oslo. Her current research projects focus on the role of private actors for the delivery of global justice, opportunities for advocacy in shrinking civic spaces, autocratic interests in international lawmaking, and the biographies of UN human rights experts. Nina earned her PhD in Political Science from the University of Potsdam and was a member of the interdisciplinary research group “International Rule of Law: Rise or Decline?” from 2016-2023. She first joined the Global Governance Centre in 2018 as visiting scholar and is affiliated as research associate since 2019. Her book Transnational Lawmaking Coalitions for Human Rights (CUP, 2022) was launched at the Graduate Institute and is the winner of the ACUNS Book Award.
Research Associate, Global Governance Centre
Alessandra Romani is a Research Associate at the Global Governance Centre of the Geneva Graduate Institute. Her research focuses on the political economy of crisis and development finance; in particular, she explores the gaps and challenges currently facing the international financial system, the factors that shape the evolution of financial and development institutions, and the impact that ongoing geopolitical shifts have on international economic cooperation. Before joining the Centre, Alessandra was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she worked with Prof. Thomas Stubbs on the politics and performance of international financial institutions; she was also Visiting Lecturer at the European School of Political and Social Sciences of the Université Catholique de Lille, where she taught a course on “Institutions of Global Economic Governance”. Alessandra received her Ph.D. in International Relations/Political Science from the Geneva Graduate Institute, with a thesis on sovereign debt management in times of crisis; during her doctoral studies, she was Visiting Scholar at the University of Michigan’s Center for Political Studies.
Research Associate, Global Governance Centre
Emrys Schoemaker is pursuing research on digital transformation in global and humanitarian affairs. He will conduct research on digital transformation in global affairs in the context of the governance of digitalisation, focusing on the global implications of domestic frameworks such as the EU’s suite of digital regulations, and developing ‘model governance frameworks’ for digital public goods, specifically for digital identity systems. He will also research the digital transformation of humanitarian response, focusing on issues of digital interoperability in the context of digitalised systems, cash and digital identity.
Research Associate, Global Governance Centre.
Ueli Staeger is a Research and Teaching Fellow (Maître-Assistant) in International Relations and Security at the University of Geneva. In July 2021, he defended his PhD thesis in International Relations/Political Science at the Graduate Institute, summa cum laude. He researches the role of international organizations (IOs) in the provision of security, with a focus on the African Union. The focus of his dissertation lied in the mechanisms through which resource mobilization affects IO secretariats’ agency. Different case studies explore the diversification of African Union resource mobilization from member states and external partners in its regular budget, peace & security and infrastructure development at the AU Development Agency AUDA-NEPAD. Additional research interests include EU foreign policy in the post-Soviet space and Africa. Ueli’s work is published in the Journal of Common Market Studies, West European Politics and International Spectator. He has previously studied at SOAS, University of London, the College of Europe and University of Geneva.
Research Associate, Global Governance Centre.
Dr Cristina Teleki holds a PhD from the Faculty of Law of Bern University. In parallel with her doctoral studies, she has worked at the European Court of Human Rights and the International Committee of the Red Cross. Dr Teleki currently works on two topics: regulation of Big Tech and cause lawyering.
Research Associate, Global Governance Centre.
Ezgi Yildiz is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), and a research affiliate at the Global Governance Center of the Geneva Graduate Institute where she used to work for the Paths of International Law: Stability and Change in the International Legal Order (PATHS) project, funded by the European Research Council. Her research is interdisciplinary, at the intersection of International Relations and International Law. Her areas of specialization include global governance, international courts and organizations, human rights, and ocean governance.
Research Associate, Global Governance Centre.
Umut Yüksel is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. He received his PhD in International Relations from the Geneva Graduate Institute. His research lies at the intersection of international security, international law, and domestic politics. He currently works on the drivers of excessive state claims over territory and maritime areas, public perceptions of maximalism, and international responses to such claims. His work has been published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution and The Review of International Organizations.