Leading Experts in Global Politics Join IKD

IKD and the OU are extremely pleased to welcome two new members: Jean Grugel, who joins the OU’s Politics and International Studies department as Professor of Global Politics, and Lorenza Fontana, who will join the same department in September as a Research Associate. From January 2016, Lorenza will also take up a Marie Curie Global Fellowship with the OU and Harvard, working on: Contentious Rights: A Comparative Study of International Human Rights Norms and their Effects on Domestic Social Conflict. The project will examine how human rights are enacted in practice, and identify the conditions under which international norms generate consensus and cooperation – or fragmentation and conflict – among domestic actors.

Both Jean and Lorenza join us from the Sheffield Institute for International Development, where they were key in the production of A Hundred Key Questions for the Post-2015 Development Agenda. The paper arose from a participatory consultative exercise which identified priorities for policy and research in collaboration with international NGOs, academics, think tanks and governmental agencies from 35 countries.

Jean’s research interests include the political economy of development and the politics of citizenship, human rights and democratisation. Amongst other areas, she has acted as an independent expert witness on the nationalisation of natural resources in Latin America and worked with NGOs in Argentina and Uruguay on the implementation of children’s rights.

Jean and Lorenza are currently coordinating a consultation in Latin America, in partnership with the United Nations Development Programme and regional research institutes, to discuss what the new Sustainable Development Goals will mean to the region and the obstacles and challenges they might face.

You can read about the challenges of co-producing research between academics and practitioners in Lorenza’s blogpost: Designing Research Agendas that Matter for a Post-2015 World. Or, to follow their project on child labour and human rights in Latin America, watch Jean’s recent IKD seminar: To Eradicate or to Legalise? Child Labour Debates and ILO Convention 182 in Bolivia.