Corina Lacatus’s research while affiliated with Queen Mary University of London and other places

Global governance systems, including international organizations (IOs), turn to academic experts to achieve a variety of policy‐related outcomes. Existing scholarship offers valuable insights into the two main functions of expertise for international organizations–instrumental and symbolic. I draw on network analysis to propose a third function–political instrumentalism–where IOs use experts' degree of connectedness to other actors to exert influence in politicized areas of policymaking and in domestic contexts in which they are less well‐networked. To this end, IOs foster epistemic communities through networks that have the characteristics of small‐world and scale‐free networks. I illustrate this with a descriptive network analysis of the International Organization for Migration's work in migrant health. Analyzing data from IOM documentation (2016–2022), I find that IOM fosters a complex (small world and scale‐free) network through an epistemic community in which academics and researchers hold powerful positions. These positions in the network can help to serve political instrumental purposes to expand IOM's influence and visibility in domestic environments in a highly politicized area of policymaking–migrant health.

Who speaks for ‘the people’? Populists across the globe have mobilised this question to attack liberal institutions, political opponents, and the democratic process itself, communicating a political reality in which globalist elites have allegedly betrayed the sovereign will of the popular community. The recent ‘surge’ (Mudde, 2016) or ‘wave’ (Aslanidis, 2016) of populism around the world has encompassed electorally successful right-wing populist leaders in the Northern Hemisphere such as Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Marine Le Pen, Jaroslav Kaczynski, Recyp Erdogan, and Victor Orbán, who have advanced nationalist, exclusionary, protectionist and Eurosceptic political agendas. In parallel, left-wing populists in Greece, Spain and Bolivia have attracted voters disillusioned with neoliberal economic policies and existing representational mechanisms of liberal democracy with anti-elitist and anti-globalist platforms. In the Southern Hemisphere, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro and Yoweri Museveni are oft-cited examples of contemporary populist leaders who have enjoyed continued electoral success with agendas promoting ethnocultural and religious-Nationalist slogans in post-colonial contexts. Prior analyses of these populists’ electoral success and political leadership have usually focused on the ideas, ideologies and strategies populism encompasses, especially in the domestic political arena.

The connection between populism and foreign policy has received a lot of scholarly attention in recent years. Nevertheless, the nature and impact of populist discourse in an African setting is understudied. This chapter aims to expand our knowledge of populist communication and foreign policy in a competitive authoritarian context, offering an analysis of two Ugandan politicians—Bobi Wine and Yoweri Museveni—and their communication on Twitter before the January 2021 election. The analysis finds that, when it comes to their position on foreign policy, the two candidates use strategic electoral communication to position themselves in relation to the West, signalling a commitment to a strong linkage with the West and democratisation in the event of electoral victory. Museveni, the long-standing incumbent, uses populist tropes that brought him past political success to reinforce his regime, highlighting his government’s well-established linkage to Western donors and experienced conduct of a successful foreign policy based on foreign aid and economic development. Counter-candidate Wine is a contemporary populist who strongly opposes the decades-long regime, critiquing the Western support for Museveni’s presidency. By the same token, Wine promises a corruption-free linkage with the West and a truthful commitment to democratisation, if successfully elected.

In recent decades, the role of human rights in peacebuilding has been the object of scholarly and practitioner debate. Some commentators criticize human rights for being inflexibly legalist and for lacking pragmatism regarding the domestic implementation of international law. Other scholars support the inclusion of human rights provisions in peace agreements, as central to sustainable peace. Which account—the legalist or the pragmatist—is indeed more accurate in the context of the language of peace agreements? This research draws on the scholarship on peacebuilding and human rights to offer a qualitative content analysis of human rights provisions in 357 peace agreements signed from 1990 to 2020. The analysis finds that, in peace agreements, some human rights provisions can serve a wider range of peace-related purposes that go far beyond a legalist purpose while still advancing the importance of alignment with international law. The findings are important, suggesting that our quest for the causes of human rights implementation failures might have to move past a critique of the language of human rights and look elsewhere for factors explaining non-compliance with international human rights.

Despite populism being a fast-growing field of inquiry, populist discourse in an African setting is understudied. This paper expands our knowledge of populist communication and foreign policy in a competitive authoritarian context, proposing an analysis of two Ugandan politicians—Bobi Wine and Yoweri Museveni—and their communication on Twitter before the January 2021 election. Counter to expectations, I find that thick ideology has a limited effect on the electoral discourses of both candidates in a competitive autocracy such as Uganda, and this applies also to their communication about foreign policy. When it comes to their position on foreign policy, strategic electoral communication is focused on positioning themselves in relation to the West, signaling a commitment to a strong future linkage with the West and democratization in the event of electoral victory. The content analysis of Twitter-based communication finds that the long-standing incumbent, Museveni, uses tried-and-tested populist tropes to reinforce his regime, emphasizing his government's allegedly strong capacity to maintain a linkage to Western donors and to conduct a successful foreign policy focused on receiving foreign aid and advancing its investment in economic development. In his turn, counter-candidate Wine is a contemporary populist who contests the long-standing regime and promises a truthful commitment to democratization and an authentic and corruption-free linkage with the West if successfully elected. This paper aims to broaden our understanding of how political leaders in competitive autocratic countries of the Global South make strategic use of populist communication about foreign policy to advance their political agendas.

Transnational regional networks of regulatory bodies play a prominent role in complex systems of human rights governance. Despite their growing importance, we still have much to learn about the roles regional networks play as regulatory stewards in the field of human rights. I draw on the literature about regulatory stewardship to analyse a recently formalised regulatory network operating in Europe – the European Network of National Human Rights Institutions. The analysis proposes a model of global governance for human rights that includes networks of national human rights institutions as intermediaries. Moreover, it draws on some of the main concepts of network analysis to assesses the European network’s development into a ‘network administrative organisation’ and applies the model of regulatory stewardship to analyse the institutional network’s use of hierarchical and managerial stewardship to: support its member institutions; stimulate intra-network communication and learning; gain access to international networks; and to shape the regional human rights agenda.

How do right-wing-populist incumbents navigate rhetorical strategic choices when they seek to manage external crises? Relevant literature has paid increasing attention to the role of ‘crisis’ in boosting the electoral success of right-wing populist candidates. We know a lot less about the rhetorical strategies used by right-wing populist incumbents seeking re-election. We draw on literatures on populism, crisis management and political rhetoric to conceptualize the rhetorical strategic choices of right-wing populist incumbents in times of crisis. We propose a framework for the choice of rhetorical strategy available to right-wing populist incumbents and illustrate it with a qualitative content analysis of Trump's tweets and White House press briefings during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. We find limited rhetorical adaptation to crisis and high degrees of continuity with previous rhetoric grounded in right-wing populism. This challenges prevalent assumptions regarding the likelihood of incumbent rhetorical flexibility in the face of crisis.

Much like his candidacy, Donald Trump’s presidency has been described as populist par excellence and as fundamentally breaking with the liberal internationalist tradition of American foreign policy. Despite a growing interest in populism and the role it has played in shaping Donald Trump’s appeal to the public at election time in 2016, we lack an understanding of how populist rhetoric after his electoral victory shaped his approach to foreign policy. This article proposes a study of President Trump’s official campaign communication through rally speeches and Twitter during the 2 months prior to the mid-term election in November 2018 as well as tweets published in the official personal account @realDonaldTrump from September to November 2018. The analysis finds that resurgent Jacksonian populism promoted by the Tea Party shapes President Trump’s approach to foreign policy. Fundamentally anti-elitist, Trump’s populism opposes migration, multilateralism, and is deeply sceptical of the United States’ capacity to support a liberal global order that he perceives as detrimental to the economic interest of the American people. In addition, the analysis finds inconsistencies between his campaign discourse of non-intervention in military conflicts abroad and his foreign policy action.

The European Union (EU) has made effective corruption control a condition for membership, but it cannot sanction non-compliance once a country has joined. The Cooperation and Verification Mechanism (CVM) was an institutional experiment to compensate the loss of sanctioning power after accession with continued monitoring. Most commentators dismiss the potential of such monitoring without enforcement. This article’s original coding of the CVM reports with regard to corruption control in Romania and Bulgaria provides an empirical basis to assess the CVM’s ability to foster compliance. It suggests that monitoring can have a positive impact on state compliance even without material sanctions: despite the low expectations in the literature, compliance in Romania was significantly better than in Bulgaria. We explain Romania’s better compliance record with successful domestic institution-building. In contrast to Bulgaria, Romania created strong anti-corruption institutions that served as a powerful institutional base for the fight against corruption. The CVM has not only had a direct effect on institution-building, but also an important indirect effect. As the anti-corruption institutions remain vulnerable to governmental interference, the CVM played a key role as a social constraint on attempts by the government to curb their power and as a focal point for societal mobilisation.

Parties to peace agreements have long considered human rights as central to the consolidation of peace and democracy in post-conflict settings. Yet, understanding of the formal institutional mechanisms that peace processes put in place to promote and protect human rights is rather limited. This article informs this gap using an original multi-level analysis of 126 peace agreements and three main categories of institutions involved in securing human rights implementation after conflict – international and regional institutions for promoting and protecting rights, as well as national human rights ombudsmen and commissions. We find that peace agreements localise human rights implementation after the end of conflict, relying more on national human rights institutions than international ones to monitor and implement human rights domestically and assist national executives with processes of transition away from conflict and toward liberal democracy. While regional and international institutions like the United Nations and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe are included in some peace agreements, their roles are much more limited and nearly exclusively aimed at offering support to new and existing national human rights commissions. We illustrate our analysis with two case studies of peace agreements in Cambodia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.