Christelle Genoud is Research Associate at The Dickson Poon School of Law, King's College London, where she works on the project Academic freedom, globalised scholarship and the rise of authoritarian China .

Previously, she served as Human Security Advisor at the Embassy of Switzerland in Beijing, where she was in charge of the human rights portfolio. She has also worked on human rights for the United Nations, NGOs and academia, at headquarters and in the field in Colombia, Palestine and Honduras.

She holds a PhD on finance and human rights entitled: “Transnational private regulation of financialized land grabbing: Can human rights regulate finance?” from the University of Lausanne.

During her PhD, she was visiting scholar at Waterloo University (Canada) and Universidad de Los Andes (Colombia). She holds a Master in Asian Studies from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.

Research interests 

Christelle Genoud’s scholarship addresses the politics of human rights and the instrumentalization of human rights narratives for political and economic purposes. She currently works on the project Academic freedom, globalised scholarship and the rise of authoritarian China where she looks at norms protecting academic freedom in the context of the marketisation of academia. In addition, she also works on the limits of the antagonism between the so-called “Western” and “Chinese” human rights narratives, as well as discrepancies between narratives and implementations.