Alexandre Mortelette joined the Institute of Political Science in March 2022. He completed a Bachelor degree in Political Science at the Freie Universität zu Berlin and wrote his Bachelor thesis on the role of civil society in peacebuilding processes, taking as an example the case of South Sudan. He earned a Master’s degree in European Governance at the University of Luxembourg, writing his thesis on the effects of the COVID-19 crisis on the Luxembourg parliamentary institution, thanks to a research internship at the Luxembourgish Parliament, the Chambre des Députés.
Alexandre has a strong experience of working in the non-governmental sector, having collaborated during his Master’s degree with several development NGOs (2019-2020) and with the congregation of development NGOs in Luxembourg (2021-2022), particularly on the themes of human rights, rights of peasants, food sovereignty and civil society’s participation to public affairs. Moreover, he is one of the founding members of the Committee of Friends of the UN Declarations on the Rights of Peasants (mis de la éclaration des roits des aysans), which is a multi-stakeholder group seeking to raise awareness of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and People Working in Rural Areas. The committee aims to support the implementation of the Declaration in Luxembourg and to inform and alert on the human rights violations of which the agricultural and peasant populations are victims.
Alexandre’s doctoral project focuses on the role of civil society in setting human rights standards, taking as an example the citizens’ initiatives pushing for the adoption of a due diligence law in several European countries. This research project will analyze the role and influence of an actor with no formal political status in human rights standard-raising and policy-making, while looking at the interactions between the scales of action (national, European and international) and their possible concordance in the field of human rights. The project will be supervised by Prof. Dr. Harmsen, holder of the UNESCO Chair in Human Rights, with whom Alexandre has already collaborated as a research assistant between 2020 and 2021.
