Cláudia Araújo

New Patterns of Mobilization for and against Democracy

Contact: c.araujo(at)uniandes.edu.co

Post-doctoral Fellow, Universidad de los Andes

Cláudia Araújo has recently obtained her PhD on Citizenship and Human Rights at the University of Barcelona with a study on the securitisation of protest in the Iberian Peninsula. She has a master’s on Migration Studies from Nova University of Lisbon and a master’s on Development Studies awarded by the Portuguese Catholic University and the Aga Khan Foundation. She is a 2024-2025 Fellow with the Foundation for Progressive European Studies (where she is working on housing rights) and a researcher with the Varieties of Democracy (V-dem) Centre for Southern Europe. Her research interests include democracy, social movements, protest and protest policing, media representations of popular mobilisation and securitisation theory. As a Global Forum fellow at the Universidad de los Andes, she will work on a project aiming to understand the use of the language of human rights in pro and anti-democracy protest around the Brazilian 2022 elections, and she plans to work on a policy brief on good practices for reporting on protest for media organisations.

Research project

Mobilisation around Democracy and over the Atlantic – Protest around the Brazilian 2022 Presidential Elections

This study delves into the dynamics of pro- and anti-democracy protests during Brazil’s 2022 presidential election. It is interested in the operationalisation of the discourse around rights by protesters on both sides of the spectrum (and the Atlantic), relying on Levitt and Merry´s (2009) proposition of the existence of several Human Rights packages circulating simultaneously and available to activists, who adapt them to their socio-political contexts, claims, and positionalities. It aims to understand which packages are assumed by protesters and why, and to shed light on how these are operationalised to create mechanisms of solidarity and exclusion. Rejecting simplistic divisions, it aims to comprehend how the “right to have rights” is understood, enacted, and demanded by protesters in diverse political contexts and how these understandings can be transnationally diffused. In a global context marked by democratic erosion, the study focuses on Brazil to discuss deteriorating democratic quality and (potential) democratic recovery through a methodological combination of Protest Event Analysis and Critical Frame Analysis.