Soyeon Park

About Me

I am a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science at Michigan State University. My research interests center on International Relations, international law and organizations, with a focus on human rights.

My dissertation examines how UN human rights treaties evolve over time and how victims and advocates strategically engage in this process. Building on the concept of treaties as ‘living instruments’—well-established in legal scholarship but underutilized in empirical political science—I develop a framework to explain how treaties’ interpretation changes through strategic engagement by non-state actors. I argue that these treaties are dynamic, continually reinterpreted by the victims and treaty body members.

Methodologically, I use a mixed-methods approach, including interviews with key stakeholders (NGOs, legal counsel, and treaty body members), fieldwork at the UN in Geneva, case studies and quantitative analysis of an original dataset of treaty jurisprudence using text analysis techniques. This project has been supported by the MSU Center for Gender in Global Context.

Beyond my dissertation, my broader research interests lie at the intersection of domestic and international politics focusing on the role of non-state actors. For example, in a forthcoming article in International Interactions, I analyze the conditions under which international election observation improves election quality, emphasizing the role of domestic groups. This paper has received the department’s Best Graduate Paper Award and the College of Social Science’s Graduate Student Research Award.

I have experience teaching and mentoring students as both a lead instructor and a teaching assistant for courses in international relations, political analysis, and the social sciences more broadly. I have also mentored undergraduate research assistants in coding, data organization, and visualization.
 
Research & Teaching Interests

International Relations, International Law and Organizations, Human Rights and Global Governance, Non-State Actors in World Politics, Mixed-Methods Research Design, Causal Inference, Text Analysis
 
Contact:
216 South Kedzie Hall
East Lansing, MI 48824 

Personal website: https://soyeon513.github.io/
Email address: sypark@msu.edu
Link to CV: https://soyeon513.github.io/assets/pdf/Park_CV.pdf