Soyeon Park

About Me
I am a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science at Michigan State University. I study international institutions, human rights, and the role of non-state actors in global governance. My research asks how international institutions change over time, who drives those changes, and how individuals and advocacy groups strategically navigate international institutions.

My dissertation, Evolving Human Rights: Overlaps, Changing Interpretations, and the Strategic Behavior of Victims, examines how the United Nations (UN) human rights treaty system evolves over time. Drawing on the concept of treaties as “living instruments,” I examine how treaty bodies, victims of human rights violations, and advocates shape changing interpretations of treaty obligations and how victims strategically navigate overlapping international institutions when seeking redress. I use a mixed-methods research design combining computational text analysis, statistical analysis, interviews, fieldwork, and qualitative case studies. My dissertation draws on an original corpus of UN human rights jurisprudence and treaty body recommendations, as well as interviews with NGOs, legal practitioners, and treaty body members and fieldwork at the UN in Geneva. This research has been supported by the National Science Foundation’s Law and Science Dissertation Grant, the Institute for Humane Studies, and MSU Center for Gender in Global Context.

My broader research examines how international and domestic actors interact to shape political outcomes. In my solo-authored article in International Interactions, I examine when international election observation improves election quality, highlighting the role of domestic monitoring groups. This paper received the department’s Best Graduate Paper Award and the College of Social Science’s Graduate Student Research Award.

In addition to my research, I have experience teaching and mentoring students as both a lead instructor and a teaching assistant in international relations, political analysis, and the social sciences. I have also mentored undergraduate researchers 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
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