UACES Microgrant Report: a trip to the United Human Rights Council in Geneva
Faced with the current state of international politics at the moment, many have been questioning what is the place for diplomacy? With the rise of far-right governments who seek to undermine the role of multilateral cooperation, one could ask: does it even exist anymore? And if so, why is it relevant to study it? My PhD research seeks to understand precisely how it is possible that international cooperation is able to take place, despite overall rhetorical contestation.
In order to better understand it, my research takes the case of the cooperation between the European Union (EU) and Brazil. While bilaterally, this partnership is often faced with contestation, in the multilateral fora, namely in United Nations Human Rights Council, this is not always the case. To comprehend how this cooperation is taking place, I wanted to go beyond the textual analysis of resolutions and go to where this cooperation takes place: Geneva.
In this sense, I was very lucky that the UACES microgrant allowed me to pursue a week of field work in Geneva to conduct interviews with diplomats working at the Human Rights Council. During my short stay in Geneva, I was also able to observe one of the sessions of the Universal Periodic Review, which allowed me to see how delegates work with each other in action. Thus, this research trip was crucial to the development of my research, and to understanding how the process of cooperation, and mostly how diplomacy has a significant – yet frequently overlooked – impact in world politics. In fact, international relations and diplomacy studies are often seen as different fields of research and with distinct purposes. Nonetheless, if there is one key takeaway from my fieldwork in Geneva is that it is incredibly valuable to not forget that world politics takes place in the form of human interactions.
