@phdthesis{01GJ5PP2X5Q3A7MZP9EH3GHBFZ,
  abstract     = {{This doctoral dissertation examines the politics of the European Union’s (EU) human rights promotion in the South Caucasus, as it is enacted, negotiated and contested on the ground. It gives impetus to the ‘decentring agenda’ in EU external relations, particularly regarding the EU’s normative engagement in the Eastern neighbourhood. By questioning these policies’ underlying assumptions and engaging with how they are envisioned by others, the dissertation aims at reconstructing them from the outside-in. Towards this end, it proposes a critical, micro-level and interpretive analysis of the EU's policies of human rights promotion, from the perspective of civil society in the South Caucasus.
Literature emphasises the depoliticising nature of the EU’s normative engagement in the Eastern neighbourhood; however, over the past decade, the norms promoted by the EU have become heavily politicised in the domestic realms in the region, resulting in increased insecurities for human rights defenders and activists. To unpack this paradox, the dissertation engages with the agency of civil society actors in the South Caucasus, who negotiate the EU’s human rights promotion on the ground. The main question addressed in this dissertation is how civil society in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia navigates the tension between the EU’s human rights promotion and contestation thereof in a shifting geo-political context. This question is tackled through the four academic articles constituting this dissertation: Article 1 serves as a building-block for theory development and provides preliminary answers, whereas the case-studies in Articles 2, 3 and 4 offer country- and policy-specific findings.
Empirically, the dissertation provides an original, detailed and complex account the EU’s human rights promotion in the South Caucasus. It investigates civil society’s role in these interventions (Article 1), as well as particular struggles around human rights in three countries and three policy fields, and how the EU intervenes therein: namely, these are LGBTQ visibility-raising in Georgia (Article 2), freedom of association and funding for civil society organisations in Azerbaijan (Article 3) and combating domestic violence in Armenia (Article 4). Theoretically, the dissertation proposes a tripartite framework combining poststructuralism, postsocialist/postcolonial and post-development thinking, to capture the logics underpinning the EU’s human rights promotion, how these are negotiated in particular locales, as well as the contestation and alternatives emerging from the ground. Methodologically, it adopts an interpretive approach based on in-depth interviews, multi-sited observations and document analysis, to uncover the processes of meaning-making, interpretation and articulation through which the social order the EU promotes in the South Caucasus is continuously formed and contested.
The Introduction of the dissertation sets the stage by justifying the focus on the South Caucasus, situating the research within the field of critical European studies and presenting the conceptual framework. It also introduces the human rights struggles under empirical examination and elaborates on the methodology and analytical strategy. Article 1 proposes a discourse-theoretical examination of how a hegemonic identity of ‘civil society’ is constructed and subverted in the EU’s human rights promotion policies in the South Caucasus. Article 2 puts forward the concept of geopoliticisation to unpack how the framing of LGBT+ equality in geopolitical terms in the context of Europeanisation shapes Georgian queer activists’ visibility-raising strategies. In Article 3, the conceptualisation of visibility as a field illuminates human rights groups and the EU’s responses to the ‘shrinking space’ for civil society in Azerbaijan, and notably to restrictions on Western donors’ funding. Article 4 presents a contrapuntal reading of the EU’s agenda to combat violence against women in Armenia, whereby EU development discourse is juxtaposed to illustrations of agency and resistance by feminist groups.
In the Conclusions, the dissertation argues that civil society in the South Caucasus retains critical agency in a contested geopolitical environment through hybridisation of the EU’s human rights promotion as well as through the articulation of pluriversal alternatives to human rights promotion. These strategies expose the logics of depoliticisation, homogenisation and geopoliticisation underpinning the EU’s human rights promotion, allowing for the (partial) unsettlement of the established order. By juxtaposing the EU logics to the contestation emerging from the ground, the dissertation’s conclusions propose pathways for imagining the EU’s human rights promotion otherwise.}},
  author       = {{Luciani, Laura}},
  keywords     = {{South Caucasus,European Union,human rights,civil society,decentring}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  pages        = {{XV, 205}},
  publisher    = {{Ghent University. Faculty of Political and Social Sciences}},
  school       = {{Ghent University}},
  title        = {{Decentring EU human rights promotion : three civil society struggles and the geo-politics of the EU's interventions in the South Caucasus}},
  year         = {{2022}},
}