The research programme ‘Equality and human rights in times of global governance’

We have met in January and February at introductory meetings of the Program group where we have set main research focuses for the next four years.

Individual research fields that are included in the research programme have visibly developed and specialised, while they often lack a more integrated, and, in particular, interdisciplinary view of the matter that would shed light on the following questions:

• Genealogies of equality/inequality: what are the findings obtained by confronting the concepts such as politics, law, (in)equality, human rights, diversity? What are the geneses of these concepts and what is their meaning in contemporary times?
• Power(lessness) of human rights: how to interpret the divide between legal-regulatory level of the observance of human rights and their disrespect in practice? How to address the problem of the collision of the universal nature of human rights with national imperatives? What does power(lessness) of human rights tell about the idea of justice and solidarity in postmodernity?
• Equality and intersectionality: how can intersectional approaches to equality and discrimination based on gender, class, ethnicity and social-economic position contribute to a more integrated understanding and solution of the problem of inequality?
• Exclusivist ideologies: how are problems of the (dis)respect of human rights, diversity and (in)equality related to ideologies of exclusion, racism, nationalism, authoritarian populism?
• Power(lessness) of social movements: which segments reveal the established institutions’, the civil society’s and new social movements’ potential to »reinvent« human rights, act for equality and shape utopias?

 Website ⇒

The overall goal of the study is to generate new knowledge, based on science.
Specific goals of the research programme include:

• deepening the understanding of the concepts of human rights, equality, diversity and non-discrimination in the era of global governance and in the light of contemporary global challenges (migration, media and technologic, social-economic, international-legal challenges);
• exploring the state of human rights from the aspect of the theories of equality, racism and populism;
• contributing to the visibility of the selected concepts as were developed by certain authors such as H. Arendt, E. Balibar, Z. Bauman, I. M. Young, B. Parekh and others.
• thinking about new theoretical concepts in human rights, equality, diversity and non-discrimination studies;
• through the publication of the research results in Slovenia bring the question of the relationship between control and fundamental rights closer to the Slovenian scientific arena;
• through the publication of research results in international journals contribute to the academic debate in the mentioned fields at the EU and international levels and thereby promote Slovenian research achievements in the world.