SPS theses of the month: April

Congratulations to Selma Kropp from the Department of Political and Social Sciences, for receiving her doctorate in April 2025, after an unanimous decision from the jury.

On 15 April 2025, Selma Kropp successfully defended her thesis, Children’s Rights in Regional Organizations: Bureaucratic Agency and Normative Change. The thesis marks an important intervention in a long-running debate over how much agency to attribute to international and regional organisations (ROs). Contra to both principal-agent analysis and early constructivist theorising, Kropp offers a new argument on how bureaucrats in ROs can shape the agenda on international rights promotion. She applies the argument to rich and varied field data gathered at the African Union and European Union, showing the differing ways they came to promote and adopt new international protections concerning the rights of children. The thesis jury - Professors Jeffrey Checkel and Stephanie Hofmann (EUI), Professor Tobias Lenz (Leuphana University of Lüneburg), and Professor Andrea Liese (University of Potsdam) - congratulate Dr Kropp on the achievement.

Read Selma Kropp’s thesis in Cadmus.