Measuring Human Rights: Challenges and Developments

Eduardo Burkle is a PhD student at the University of Georgia with a research interest in human rights, populism, and transitional justice. He holds an MA in Human Rights and Democratization from the Global Campus of Human Rights and an LLB from the Universidade Estadual de Londrina. For his work focused on the Brazilian transitional justice experience, he earned the Global Campus Europe (EMA) Award and an honorable mention for the Antonio Candido Award (Latin American Studies Association – Brazil Section).

K. Chad Clay is the Director of the Center for the Study of Global Issues (GLOBIS) and an Associate Professor of International Affairs at the University of Georgia. He has extensive experience in human rights measurement, serving as Co-Founder and Methodology Research & Design Lead of the Human Rights Measurement Initiative (HMRI), co-PI of the Sub-national Analysis of Repression Project (SNARP), co-creator of the Worker Rights in Law and Practice (WorkR) data, and, formerly, the co-director of the now-archived CIRI Human Rights Data Project. He received his PhD at Binghamton University in 2012.

Stephen Bagwell has a passion for understanding the economic causes and consequences of governments behaving badly. As a political scientist, he teaches courses on human rights, political economy, and research methods. He has worked on several measurement projects related to human rights and well-being. Stephen’s research has appeared in the Journal of Human Rights, Human Rights Review, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, the Journal of Global Security Studies, The Conversation, and The Washington Post. He earned his PhD in 2019 from the University of Georgia, and is currently an assistant professor at the University of Missouri- St Louis.

Elizabeth Kaletski is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at Ithaca College. Her expertise is at the intersection of applied labour and development economics. She teaches courses on inequality, development, labour, and gender from both a micro and macro perspective. Her teaching interests directly overlap with her research, which currently focuses on children’s rights, economic and social rights, and data measurement. This has led her to currently serve as a research affiliate at the Human Rights Measurement Initiative, IZA Institute of Labour Economics, and the Economic and Social Rights Research Group at the Human Rights Institute.

Annie Watson is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Middle Georgia State University, where she has worked since 2021. She also currently serves as a Research Fellow for Women’s and Children’s Rights at the Human Rights Measurement Initiative (HRMI) and a Research Analyst for the Social and Economic Rights Fulfilment (SERF) Index, in addition to working on other human rights measurement projects. She earned her PhD in Political Science and International Affairs from the University of Georgia in 2020.