Claus Wisser Postdoctoral Programme, funded by a generous donation from the late Claus Wisser, carried out in cooperation with the Pro Universitate Foundation, and directed by Prof. Dr. Rainer Forst and Prof. Dr. Nicole Deitelhoff

Duration of stay: October 2024 – July 2025

Selma Kropp is a political scientist trained in universities in Germany, France, and Italy. Before starting her doctoral project, she worked for the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Fundamental and Human Rights in Vienna and the Dahrendorf Programme for the Study of Freedom at St. Antony’s College in Oxford. Her academic work focuses on bureaucratic action in International and Regional Organizations, human rights, and children’s rights. Her PhD thesis, which she pursued at the European University Institute in Florence, is entitled “Children’s Rights in Regional Organizations Bureaucratic Agency and Normative Change.” In the context of her doctoral research, she conducted fieldwork, including archival research and interviewing in Addis Ababa, Brussels, and Strasburg.

Her Claus Wisser Fellowship project is entitled “Children’s Rights in the Context of Migration: Navigating the Regime Complex between Strasbourg, Brussels, and Geneva.” It explores how European bureaucrats use organizational overlaps between the Council of Europe and the European Union to raise controversial children’s rights issues on the European agenda. One of the most contentious issues among member states of the European Union concerns children’s rights in migration situations. Even though international and European law posits that children should be deprived of their liberty only as a measure of last resort, children continue to be detained in Europe in migration-related contexts. This has been highlighted, for instance, in the last UN Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty in 2019. By examining attempts by European member states to avoid public scrutiny when it comes to violations of self-set standards at the international level as well as reactions by European bureaucrats, this project fits into the current theme of Normative Orders, “The Future of Democracy”. Theoretically, it contributes to regime complexity and critical International Relations norm research.