About the lecture
The creation of international normative standards in the area of human rights and gender equality is a significant achievement, and one that is constantly evolving.
However, the actual purpose of such norms is to resonate within societies and transform discriminatory ideas and practices.
How can we assess if (and how) international frameworks have such an effect?
In this talk, I discuss two approaches that try to answer this question.
One focuses on correlating state commitment to international norms with quantifiable social change; the other traces multiple forms of agency that aims to connect international standards and domestic practices. Reflecting on the contribution and deficiencies of each approach, I suggest to acknowledge the complexity and principled incompleteness of norm translation processes.
About Susanne Zwingel
Susanne Zwingel is Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Florida International University. Her research interests are women’s human rights and their translation, women’s movements and public gender policies around the world, global governance and gender, and feminist and post-colonial IR theories.
She is author of Translating International Women’s Rights: The CEDAW Convention in Context (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and co-editor of Feminist Strategies in International Governance with Elisabeth Prügl and Gülay Caglar (Routledge, 2013).
She has published in several peer-reviewed journals, among them International Studies Quarterly, International Studies Review, and Feminist International Journal of Politics