Richard F. Georgi

Senior Research Fellow

georgi@mpil.de

Main Fields of Research:

Academic Career:

F. Richard Georgi is Senior Research Fellow in the project on norm contestations over human rights due diligence. He developed his interdisciplinary background in education and research through a PhD in Peace and Development from the University of Gothenburg and a Diplom in Political Science from the Free University Berlin. F. Richard Georgi held positions as contract researcher for the German Insitute for Human Rights and as human rights observer in Mexico. He also gathered substantial volunteering experiences for activist organizations in different countries, which inform both his staunch believe in and relentless critique of human rights.

In his dissertation, F. Richard Georgi researched the politics of human rights activism in Colombia amid a violent reality characterized by the end of the armed conflict with the FARC-EP and the deferred promise of peace. The PhD thesis focuses on the voices of human rights defenders in very different positions and Colombian regions, which he gathered through participant observation, in-depth interviews, and document analysis. The four research articles, which form the backbone of the thesis, bring the testimonies of human rights defenders in conversation with scholarly debates, not limited to the fields of human rights, international relations, and peace & conflict studies.

F. Richard Georgi has researched, taught, and published on: human rights, activism, political mobilization and populism, peace & conflict, transitional justice, (digital) capitalism and justice, de-constructionist political philosophy, discourse theory & ethnography of discourses, and feminist methodologies.

Recent Publications

• 
  Political Imaginaries amidst a Peace Deferred. The Politics of Human Rights Activism in the 2016 Colombian Peace Process. University of Gothenburg, Göteborg, 2022, 330 p. doi: ISBN (Print) 978-91-8009-606-5, PhD Thesis PhD thesis in library
  
• Peace through the Lens of Human Rights: Mapping Spaces of Peace in the Advocacy of Colombian Human Rights Defenders. In: Political Georgraphy 99, 1-11 (2022). doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2022.102780. Peace through the lens of human rights
  
• The Popular Appeal of Human Rights Activism: Re-Imagining Transitional Justice as a Political Struggle. In: Global Studies Quarterly 2/3, 1-12 (2022). doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/isagsq/ksac019. Popular appeal of human rights
  
• Peace that Antagonizes: Reading Colombia’s Peace Process as Hegemonic Crisis. In: Security Dialogue 0, 1-19 (2022). doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106221084444. Peace that antagonizes
  
• Spatial Imaginaries and (Transitional) Justice in Colombia's Borderlands. In: Peace Review 33/4, 470-478 (2022). doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/10402659.2021.2043006. Spatial imaginaries
  

[more]

In-between Translation, Transformation and Contestation: Studying Human Rights Activism as Politics-as-Ruptures in Violent Social Conflicts. In: Millennium: Journal of International Studies 48/1, 3-24 (2019). doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829819858656. In-between translation, transformation and contestation


The Human Rights Project and the Transformation of Social (B)orders. In: International Journal of Human Rights 21/3, 270-288 (2017). doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/13642987.2017.1298732. The human rights project


The Role of Civil Society in Conflict Transformation. Human Rights and the (De- )securitization of Ethno-political Conflict. In: Securitization, Intervention, and Statebuilding, Thorsten Bonacker, Werner Distler, Maria Ketzmerick (eds.). Nomos, Baden-Baden 2017, 215-243.


Human Rights Activism and the De-Securitization of the ‘Other’. In: Politikon: The IAPSS Journal of Political Science 29, 55-87 (2016). doi: https://doi.org/10.22151/politikon.29.4. Human rights activism


The Invocation of Human Rights and the (De-)securitization of Ethno-Political Conflicts. In: Journal EXIT-Deutschland. Fachzeitschrift für De-radikalisierung und Demokratische Kultur 2, 234-342 (2014).

Blogposts

• Confronting Violent Peace: When Peace Processes become the Crisis of Armed Conflict. Sage Perspectives (Editor's pick), 2022. Confronting violent peace (blog post)
  
• ”May peace not cost us our lives”: Reading Colombia’s peace process as hegemonic crisis. PRIO blog, 2022. May peace not cost us our lives (Blog post)
  
• Teaching on Zoom: The Real Version. School of Blogal Studies, 2020 (with Anja K. Franck, Joseph Trawicki Anderson). Teaching on zoom: the real version
  

Media

• Discourse of Justice Part I. What do human rights defenders think of transitional justice?. In: Inkstick Media and The World, 28.04.2022, p. Online. Discourse of justice
  

Teaching

Participation in Conferences at Home and Abroad