I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I study international relations with a focus on human rights, international organizations, and the politics of norm promotion. Before joining Illinois, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University (2023–2024). I hold a PhD in Political Science and an M.A. in Statistics from the University of Pennsylvania (2023), an M.Sc. in International Studies from Torcuato Di Tella University (Argentina, 2018), and a B.Sc. from the University of San Andrés (Argentina, 2011).

My research asks why international efforts to defend human rights sometimes produce reform and sometimes provoke resistance. I approach this as a fundamentally relational problem: the consequences of pressure, criticism, and monitoring in world politics depend not only on what is said or done, but on the relationships between those who exert pressure and those who receive it. Across my work, I examine how states, international organizations, and non-governmental actors attempt to hold one another accountable — and how those attempts reshape institutions, foreign policies, and the domestic politics of targeted states. To answer these questions, I build original large-scale datasets from diplomatic and institutional records, combining computational text analysis, causal inference, and network methods with elite interviews and fieldwork on several continents.

My research has been published or accepted in International Organization, British Journal of Political Science, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Peace Research, and Journal of Democracy, among others. It has been recognized with the Ken Sherrill Best Dissertation Award in LGBTQ Politics and the LGBTQ Caucus Best Paper Award from the American Political Science Association, and with the Best Article Award of the International Law Section and the Steve Poe Best Graduate Student Paper in Human Rights from the International Studies Association.

Prior to academia, I worked at the MERCOSUR Institute of Public Policy on Human Rights and at the Argentine Council for International Relations (CARI), where I contributed to policy analysis on human rights and multilateral diplomacy in Latin America.

The Paradox of Condemnation: When Criticism Fosters and Undermines LGBT Rights

Book Project

Why does international pressure for human rights sometimes spark reform and sometimes trigger backlash? My book project addresses that puzzle through the lens of LGBT rights, one of the most contested fault lines in contemporary world politics. I revise condemnation as a three-actor episode — a sender, a target, and the states observing the exchange — and argue that its consequences depend on two things: the identity relationship between critic and audience, and whether a country is the named target or an unnamed observer. Condemnation from outsiders hardens its targets, while its real power operates on observers — states that recognize the critic as one of their own and adjust their behavior before ever being named. Criticism, in this account, is information: it reveals which norms a country’s reference group is willing to enforce. I develop this relational theory with an original corpus of over 350,000 diplomatic statements, a new global panel of LGBT policies, a survey experiment, roughly 150 elite interviews, and case studies of reform and backlash from national legislatures to municipal politics. The book challenges conventional “naming and shaming” accounts and offers a framework for understanding when human rights advocacy succeeds — and when it backfires.

Finding the Right Forum: Non-State Actor Engagement in International Organizations

R&R — Review of International Organizations

with Rachel Schoner

How does institutional design affect non-state actors’ preference for regional versus global organizations? We consider these actors as strategic decision-makers, choosing where to engage based on the costs and benefits of each IO’s institutional design. Focusing on the human rights regime, we compare the Inter-American System of Human Rights and the UN human rights treaty system using novel individual petition data. Our findings show that when actors have access to a legally binding decision, petitions increase in such organizations and decrease in alternative ones.

Working Paper

The Rainbow Ripple Effect: LGBT Advocacy and the Expansion of Foreign Aid

Working Paper

with Simone Dietrich

What drives countries to promote sexual minority rights through foreign aid? We argue that variation in LGBT aid is explained by the role of donor-based international NGOs specializing in LGBT rights. Using a novel dataset on LGBT aid from 29 Western donor countries, we find robust evidence that INGOs increase donors’ commitments to LGBT rights, and that this influence is amplified when governments adopt foreign policies prioritizing minority protections.

Legitimizing States: Illiberal NGOs in the Universal Periodic Review

Working Paper

with Sarah Bush

This paper examines the emergence of illiberal NGOs — organizations that exclusively praise states in the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) — and their role in global norm contestation. Using a new dataset of NGO submissions and 40 elite interviews, we show that illiberal NGOs cluster around states coordinating through the Like-Minded Group (LMG) at the Human Rights Council. Our empirical analysis reveals that LMG participation, rather than regime type alone, predicts the presence and volume of illiberal NGOs, and that these NGOs adopt LMG rhetoric emphasizing sovereignty while downplaying civil and political freedoms.

Gino Pauselli

Gino Pauselli