Dongwook Kim received his Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in August 2009. His dissertation, entitled Institutionalizing Human Rights: The United Nations, Nongovernmental Organizations and National Human Rights Institutions, examined why states adopt the UN idea of national human rights institutions and hence create a permanent and independent state institution to promote and protect human rights. The dissertation argued that in the human rights issue area characterized by low cross-border externalities, sovereignty-bound international organizations, and weak self-enforcement by states, human rights NGOs are especially important for states' policy adoption. In his dissertation, Kim specified three causal mechanisms linking NGOs to global diffusion and demonstrated that the UN idea gains special traction in the states connected with strong human rights NGO activism by using event history analysis and case studies.

During the postdoctoral fellowship at CDDRL (2009-2010), Kim will examine the abolition of the death penalty, Amnesty International's letter-writing campaigns called ‘Urgent Action Appeals,' and the effectiveness of national human rights institutions. He will also expand his unique quantitative data on international human rights NGOs to cover the entire period from 1948 to 2009.