(Un)Equal Before the UPR - Power and Race in the United Nations Human Right‘s Council‘s Universal Periodic Review

In 2006, the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR) was established to address alleged bias in UN human rights debates. Past research has focused on how strategic relations between states might still bias peer review. However, this approach neglects power status and race in interstate human rights interactions. This paper asks instead whether race biases UPR out-comes. I argue power status matters because compliance with human rights norms is a criterion for "good sovereignty", and non-compliance carries material and social costs for states. Furthermore, the legacy of historical interstate racism and racist stereotypes about majority non-White states’ capacities result in the contestation of human rights norms along racial lines. Altogether, this renders human rights peer review fertile ground for racialized status politics. I analyze the severity of UPR recommendations states have made to each other from 2008-2014 to investigate, whether state racial identity, its position in the racial hierarchy, and its power status influence the UPR recommendations. Preliminary results suggest that there seems to be little evidence of such bias in the UPR, providing an optimistic outlook on interstate racial equality in a context of entrenched in-ternational inequalities. The paper contributes to the study of race and IR, status in IR, and human rights naming and shaming.