Therese Boje Mortensen defends her PhD-thesis in Human Rights Studies: "NGOs as child rights implementers in India: How NGO workers negotiate human rights responsibility in 'partnership' with a neoliberal and restrictive state". Faculty opponent is Professor Aradhana Sharma (Wesleyan University).

Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) increasingly enter into “partnerships” with states to implement human rights, a phenomenon that has been studied both as a necessary inclusion of civil society in human rights practice, and as a slippery slope towards a neoliberal state retreat. What remains to be studied is how this partnership practice shapes the concepts of human rights and their duty bearers. What happens when the “covenant version” of rights – where the state is the duty bearer – meets this partnership practice? Through an ethnographic conceptual analysis inspired by Sally Merry’s “vernacularisation” theory and Sumi Madhok’s theory of “vernacular rights cultures,” this study analyses NGO-state partnerships in the paradoxically both rights-based and neoliberal, but also autocratising, Indian state.

Download the thesis as a pdf-file here.

Faculty opponent: Aradhana Sharma (Wesleyan University)

Examination committee: Reetta Toivanen (University of Helsinki); Julie Fraser (University of Utrecht); Anders Uhlin (Lund University); Eric Brandstedt (Lund University, reserve).

Chair: Lena Halldenius