Triage in Human Rights Organizations: Structures, Repertoires of Practice, the Law

• In Event: 292 - Regular Session. Organizations: Organizational Decision-Making

Abstract

This paper examines how human rights organizations make decisions about how to allocate resources, and how to manage their commitments to specific causes, specific people, and specific territorial units. Based on an analysis of organizational reports and in-depth interviews with program managers in a range of international human rights organizations, it shows how organizational structures and themes direct resources, how a broad but still limited set of accepted practices shape what organizations do, and how perceived levers in the environment shape human rights work. The paper contributes to our understanding of human rights by offering a reconstruction of the logic of practice of international human rights organizations. It explores how comparative work on organizations or sets of organizations more generally can benefit from asking across cases about how triage is practiced. It suggests asking about triage as a way to open up empirical questions that does not make assumptions about type, goals or functions of organizations.

Authors

• Monika Christine Krause, University of London-Goldsmiths

• Katherine Robinson, University of London-Goldsmiths