Alvina Hoffmann

Alvina Hoffmann is a Lecturer in Diplomatic Studies at SOAS, University of London. Her research and teaching interests are in human rights and humanitarianism, the sociology of elites and experts, transnational professionals, socio-legal studies and the UN.  

Currently, she is working on her first monograph titled Speaking for the Universal: Human Rights Elites in World Politics. The book provides a historical, sociological and collective biographical analysis of the body of independent human rights experts in UN human rights commissions, fact-finding missions and the special procedures.

Her research has appeared in the European Journal of International Relations, International Political Sociology, the Cambridge Review of International Affairs and Global Studies Quarterly. She won the International Studies Association Theory Section Best Article Prize (2024) and the United Nations Association of Germany Best Dissertation Prize (2024).

Before joining SOAS, she taught at King’s College London and Queen Mary University of London. She holds a PhD from King’s College London, Master’s from Sciences Po Paris, and an MSc from LSE. 

Alvina’s research focuses on transnational human rights struggles and spokespersons of the ‘universal’. Spokespersons, such as diplomats, lawyers and human rights actors, routinely speak with authority on behalf of someone else in international politics. Her work argues that the power of the spokesperson is built on a paradox: They speak for but also instead of someone else and hence simultaneously empower and silence the spoken-for. She has explored this question in the context of human rights struggles in Crimea.

Additionally, she examines human rights experts and elite lawyers who she theorises as ‘plural professionals’, actors with multiple professional trajectories and institutional resources. These multiple professional identities allow them to construct their independence. This research uses biographical interviews, collective biographical analysis (prosopography) and data visualisation.

She is currently working on her first monograph entitled Speaking for the Universal: Human Rights Elites in World Politics. The book analyses how independent UN human rights experts have become ‘spokespersons of the universal’ to offer a new perspective on international human rights. The analysis spans the first UN missions on human rights from 1950s-70s, an analysis of patterned professional biographical trajectories, and strategies of human rights experts to increase the effectiveness of their work.

ORCID