Sanela Diana Jenkins HR Series: The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions are Changing World Politics

Kathryn Sikkink is a Regents Professor and the McKnight Presidential Chair in Political Science at the University of Minnesota.  She has a M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University.  Her publications include Mixed Signals: U.S. Human Rights Policy and Latin America;  Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (co-authored with Margaret Keck);  The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change (co-edited with Thomas Risse and Stephen Ropp); Restructuring World Politics: Transnational Social Movements, Networks and Norms (co-edited with Sanjeev Khagram and James Riker); and Ideas and Institutions: Developmentalism in Brazil and Argentina.  Her book Activist Beyond Borders was awarded the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas for Improving World Order, and the International Studies Association Chadwick Alger Award for Best Book in the area of International Organizations.  Her newest book The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions are Changing World is forthcoming from W.W. Norton in 2011. Sikkink has been a Fulbright Scholar in Argentina, and has received a Guggenheim fellowship for her research on human rights prosecutions in the world. She is a fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Association for Arts and Sciences, and a member of the editorial board of International Studies Quarterly, and International Organization. 

Her current research interests focus on the influence of international law on domestic politics, especially in the area of human rights, transnational social movements and networks, and on the role of ideas and norms in international relations and foreign policy. With the support of the Twentieth Century Fund, she is currently involved in a research project on the international human rights idea and the evolution and effectiveness of human rights policies, especially in Latin America.