"Dynamics of Resilience. Regional Human Rights Regimes in Times of Backlash" explores how the institutional ecosystem of regional human rights courts can support courts in a situation of attack. By focusing on the dynamics of institutional change, this thesis expands the analysis of backlash against human rights courts to study the institutional embeddedness of courts. It adopts insights from international law, international relations, and organizational sociology to provide the first comparative analysis of the challenges and adaptations of regional human rights institutions from two distinct conceptual vantage points: backlash and resilience.
This thesis asks how the European and Inter-American human rights regimes have responded to instances of backlash in the period between 2010 and 2022. Its main focus is thus institutional – it represents a first attempt at mapping and tracing the multiple ways that backlash has affected institutional practices. A close observation of institutional practices, especially as they are reformed, modified, or adjusted in the context of backlash, visualizes the dynamics of institutional change. The productive change of institutional practices is thereby analyzed as a form of institutional resilience. In particular, the thesis adopts the conceptual toolbox from Albert O. Hirschmann and his classic framework of "Exit, Voice, and Loyalty" to understand the institutional changes in the Eurpean and Inter-American human rights system.
Against this background, this thesis adopts an interdisciplinary, qualitative approach from a comparative perspective. It focuses on the European and Inter-American human rights regimes, from the 1990s to 2022, to identify both commonalities and differences in their institutional response to backlash. The thesis combines different methodological tools such as doctrinal analysis, process tracing, and semi-structured expert interviews, to trace the development of exit procedues, reform processes, and changing communication strategies.
