Kathryn Sikkink - Human Rights, Evidence and Global Governance

In this episode, we welcome Professor Kathryn Sikkink, one of the most influential scholars of human rights, transnational advocacy and global accountability. The conversation opens with her early encounters with dictatorship in Uruguay and a sustained challenge to familiar origin stories that locate human rights primarily in the 1970s. For Sikkink, Latin America is not a peripheral or late adopter but a formative site of treaty-making, institutional design and early litigation that helped constitute the international human rights project within global governance. We then trace the movement from advocacy to scholarship. Sikkink reflects on the sharp disjuncture she encountered within political science, where NGOs, civil society and human rights were largely absent from mainstream international relations teaching. This experience shaped Activists Beyond Borders and her enduring concern with how transnational advocacy networks operate across states, institutions and social movements. From there, the discussion turns to transitional justice and the Global Accountability research programme, including why early prosecutions prioritised certain crimes, how gender attentiveness emerged only belatedly and why attention to violence against women can generate spillover effects rather than crowding out other harms. A central theme is epistemic humility in an age of expanding data. Sikkink explains the “information paradox”, why improved reporting can make human rights performance appear worse and what this means for evaluating China and other contexts where information is actively suppressed. The episode closes with a defence of comparative realisation as an ethical stance, a rejection of end-times narratives and a grounded account of hope as an empirically informed practice within global governance rather than an act of optimism alone. Kathryn Sikkink is the Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. Kathryn Sikkink’s profile can be found here: https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty/kathryn-sikkink We discussed: • Evidence for Hope: Making Human Rights Work in the 21st Century. Princeton University Press, 2017. • The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions are Changing World Politics. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2011. • The Persistent Power of Human Rights: From Commitment to Compliance (with Thomas Risse and Stephen C. Ropp). Cambridge University Press, 2013. • Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (with Margaret Keck). Cornell University Press, 1998.