UC Irvine

International human rights agreements have always faced challenging questions concerning application and enforceability: What concretely must nation-states do to fulfill their commitments, and how can they be made to do it? This dissertation provides a multi-sited ethnographic analysis of the phenomenon of assessment – or evaluation – as a mode of governing states’ human rights obligations. It shows that processes of evaluation do much more than “check up” on states’ adherence to a pre-given model of compliance. Instead, through evaluation practice, I contend, state, inter-governmental, and non-governmental actors interpret, negotiate, and ultimately make and re-make what it means to comply.

I investigate assessment in the context of the United Nations human rights framework on racial discrimination, anchored in the 1965 International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. My study is organized around three procedures UN agencies prescribe for states that have ratified this Convention. One is an external review procedure conducted by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. The other two are internal “self-evaluations” to be undertaken by states themselves: the production of ethno-racially disaggregated census statistics, and the creation of national action plans. My research on both of these focuses on national processes carried out in Costa Rica, a state that many UN agencies hope to make a regional model for combating discrimination.

The UN framework conceptualizes racial discrimination very broadly and in relation to a wide range of subject-matter areas. In each of my sites, I examine how constellations of actors and knowledge infrastructures determine which social, political, and economic problems oblige state remedy under the framework’s provisions. The dissertation draws attention to the varied epistemological commitments, interpretive openings, and social relations through which UN and Costa Rican state actors render knowledge of discrimination in the course of assessment practice. It further highlights how procedural forms themselves shape, foreground, and filter what gets named as discrimination, and who as its subjects. I thus show that assessments constitute dynamic processes through which actors adapt human rights norms’ meanings and mandates, and importantly, multiply and differentiate what count as obligations across time and states.