networks of power and influence at the universal periodic review
In Geneva, I worked on a variety of different projects at different international organisations throughout my MA studies.
Being an anthropologist / sociologist in Geneva means that the United Nations and similar organisations could be places for ‘fieldwork’, and I took full advantage of that: diving into the archives of the International Labour Organisation, visiting lectures at the libraries of the United Nations, recording the infamous Room XX (20) at the United Nations, and interviewing the UNHCR Innovation team about their practices for supporting refugee populations.
At the Graduate Institute, I started becoming increasingly interested in anthropological studies of bureaucracy (even the ritual of paperwork!) and the notion of ‘studying up’ with systems of power rather than simply apply the ethnographic lens to societies far flung from where I lived (that were often in asymmetrical power dyamics with the academia industrial-complex). Following the threads of interests from my undergrad and my time in journalism and immersive education, I explored the politics of business and human rights and international networks of extraction.
Introduced by my professor and mentor Julie Billaud, I soon become obsessed with this obscure mechanism for international relations called the ‘Universal Periodic Review’.
For my blog on the Frictionless Data website, I wrote a bit about what the UPR does:
The UPR [is a monitoring mechanism of the Human Rights Council (UNHRC) that reviews the human rights records of all member states]. It was established in 2006 by the UN Human Rights Council (which had been made in turn to promote the protection of human rights around the world), both as a means through which countries could review and respond to each other’s human rights records, and as a forum for sharing best practices. Unlike the HRC, which evaluates countries collectively, the UPR allows countries to communicate more directly and in a public forum. Evaluated according to the language and laws that were codified in the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, the UPR is the only mechanism of its kind.
I ended up proposing a network analysis project for a fellowship that allowed me to analyse the relationships between different states using UPR data. I was curious about whether such analysis might make it possible to understand colloquial ideas of power and influence at the UPR: i.e. if “power is money”, or conversely, if the UPR recommendation system might be a “weapon of the weak”, as it is sometimes thought to be.
This project also exposed me to the infrastructures of open data in real time, as it was uploaded and organised on uwazi, the open source toolkit built by the data host, HURIDOCS.
This was the first time I was exposed to the politics of technical infrastructure, and seeing what open source could make possible in the fields that I was exposed to (which at this point, was primarily sustainable development, humanitarian action, and human rights).
This work was funded by the Open Knowledge Foundation through the Frictionless Data Reproducible Research fellowship throughout 2019 and 2020