How did you come to choose your research topic?

I wouldn’t necessarily say that I chose my research topic but rather that I eventually arrived to it – it was a very iterative process. While the decision to look at how human rights obligations are being construed beyond the traditional confines of the state-citizen relationship was already formed during my master’s research at the University of Exeter, I only realised that this is simply one aspect of a more comprehensive shift in human rights governance after my first year at the Geneva Graduate Institute. 

As lawyers, we often tend to have a relatively narrow view of how law appears – in the form of a treaty, a statute, or perhaps a court decision. But what I noticed with international human rights law is that it increasingly appears in unexpected spaces that aren’t necessarily at the centre of attention for international lawyers. Despite the fact that it has become very difficult to generate new human rights agreements at the multilateral level, human rights language is becoming more and more common in the statutes of sports organisations such as FIFA or the terms and conditions of large online platforms like Facebook or X. I found this deeply fascinating, especially since this process of “transnationalisation” can be a way of reinventing or rejuvenating the human rights movement in light of on-going political pressures and well-founded critiques. Yet here I again have to emphasise the iterative nature of arriving at a research topic – I only identified this broader process of transnational human rights governance by learning more about theoretical accounts of international law, by going back and forth between what I look at and how I look at it, and by staying attentive to the big picture while analysing micro developments within the human rights field. 

Can you describe your thesis questions and the methodology you use to approach those questions?

My overarching goal was to account for this embrace of human rights language at the margins of international law and critically examine to what uses it is being put in a changing global governance context. As such, the key question that I sought to unpack is: How can we understand the process of transnationalisation of human rights through the lens of narrative? As I was not interested in figuring out what the law is in a specific area but rather in understanding how actors use it, this prompted a lot of reflection about what methodology I could use to explain what is essentially a social practice of regulatory stakeholders. Researching law and literature scholarship pointed me to narrative theory, and the concept of narrative proved highly productive. In many ways, storytelling is very similar to law – it seeks to persuade, to be compelling, but at the same time allows for plurality because the same story narrated by two people will often paint a different picture of events. Thinking of the transnational governance of human rights in terms of the narratives that stakeholders construct gave me a useful toolkit to explain how human rights norms are used as a strategic language, and especially so in a regulatory context where actors have more flexibility in how they engage and interpret these rules. 

What are your major findings?

The thesis makes two key contributions to scholarship on transnational human rights governance, and perhaps international law more broadly. In the first place, it foregrounds choice as the crucial consideration of actors when they engage with human rights in the transnational sphere. This might appear banal but both narrative and law are incredibly proficient in obscuring the fact that they are the result of choices. By undertaking an enquiry into the “how” of the narrative construction of human rights – e.g., asking how sports governance actors invoke non-discrimination to convey inevitability, or how the temporal positioning of normative developments provides a sense of progress in business and human rights – the thesis draws attention to the instrumental and utilitarian uses to which human rights narratives are put. This is important in coming to grips with the transnationalisation of human rights, and I see it as an indispensable step for any further research that would focus on the political economy of the process, or the motivations and drivers of particular actors engaging in it. 

The second key contribution of the thesis is methodological. By developing the narrative approach to analysing law used in the project, I have tried to operationalise narrative as a tool through which we can critically scrutinise the “narrative moves” that make dominant legal narratives so successful. I hope that this may allow us to be more attentive to instances when hegemonic actors deploy them in the legal context, and perhaps even to “reverse-engineer” certain elements of new legal narratives for more emancipatory uses.

What are you doing now?

Since submitting my thesis, I have been working at the Global Health Centre of the Geneva Graduate Institute, assisting with convening and capacity-building events focusing on global health diplomacy and governance. In January 2025, thanks to the generous support of the Swiss National Science Foundation’s Postdoc.Mobility programme, I will begin a two-year fellowship at the University of Edinburgh Law School researching the processes of translation of international law into private transnational governance, and their implications for the de-legalisation of global governance.

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Tomáš Morochovič defended his PhD thesis in International Law on 27 June 2024. Professor Nico Krisch presided over the committee, which included Professor Andrew Clapham, Thesis Director, and, as External Reader, Professor Frédéric Mégret, Faculty of Law, McGill University, Montreal, Canada.

Citation of the PhD thesis: 
Morochovič, Tomáš. “In Search of New Stories: Human Rights Narratives in the Transnational Governance of Sport, the Internet, and Corporations.” PhD thesis, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, 2024.
An abstract of the PhD thesis is available on this page of the Geneva Graduate Institute’s repository. As the thesis itself is embargoed until October 2027, please contact Dr Morochovič for access.

Banner image: Shutterstock/ProPhoto1234.
Interview by Nathalie Tanner, Research Office.