The Centre for Global Law represents a focal point of competence and knowledge on Global Law and Governance in Brazil and Latin America via the collaboration and the exchange of knowledge with high-level experts worldwide with the following objectives:
• To develop research projects focused on multidisciplinarity and on mixed methodologies, comprising both qualitative and quantitative methods
• To deliver an academic-added value by providing a platform of cooperation, intellectual exchange and facilitation between the participating academics, practitioners, policy-makers and civil society.
Core Dimensions
The Centre’s research projects are structured around four core dimensions: Global Regulation (a), International dispute settlement (b), Climate Change and Forests (c) and Human Rights and Democracy (d).
This research area focuses on multi-level decision-making and policy development in international and regional organizations. One of the core research projects aims to analyze, on the one hand, the decision-making process before the World Health Organization (WHO) and, on the other, the direct and indirect effect of the legal instruments issued by the organization in the Brazilian domestic legal order and in the jurisprudence of the Brazilian supreme courts. The project applies mixed methods with a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, including natural langue processing (NLP) techniques to identify content similarity and, ultimately, the indirect influence of such international norms whenever they are not expressly cited by the domestic instruments.
Over the last decades, the participation of State and non-State actors in the process of international law-making has become one of the most interesting features of international law. Recent changes include the participation of new actors and a more influential role of the judicial bodies attached to international organizations. These multifaceted bodies, beyond resolving interstate disputes, play a crucial role in shaping normative expectations. This expanded role of international courts and tribunals (ICTs) strengthens the legal discourse by ensuring its responsiveness to the evolving needs and concerns of the international community. By interpreting and applying international law in light of these evolving demands, ICTs act as guardians of the international community’s values, fostering and protecting them through their decisions and interpretations of international law.
The urgency and gravity of climate change push for effective mitigation and adaptation actions. Rising sea levels, extreme weather events, and biodiversity loss are just some of the consequences demanding immediate attention. Faced with the shortcomings of climate change governance, State and non-State actors are increasingly turning to judicial institutions to advance their claims for environmental protection. By requesting advisory opinions on the interpretation of treaties or the international obligations regarding climate change, State and non-State actors can gain valuable legal clarity and potentially strengthen their claims for environmental protection. Furthermore, deforestation, a critically overlooked issue that exacerbates climate change, compels international institutions to adopt dedicated regulatory instruments to tackle it effectively. Forests play a vital role in carbon sequestration, and deforestation releases significant amounts of greenhouse gases back into the atmosphere. By strengthening regulations on trade, promoting sustainable forest management practices, and enforcing existing environmental laws, international institutions can play a crucial role in curbing deforestation and mitigating climate change.
Projects within this core area include the assessment of the legitimacy of international and regional decision-making processes; issues of transparency; accountability; and the discussion of the extent and limits of individual participation in international and regional decision-making processes. It also aims to further address the current debates over the rule of law and its challenges.
Mixed Methodology
The Centre develops research projects employing mixed methodology, notably with the use of the sequential eclectic approach, comprising theoretical and empirical analysis with both qualitative and quantitative elements in a multi-layered analysis.
Quantitative methods confer the possibility to establish systematic patterns, while qualitative methods are more adequate to capture socially complex phenomena, to identify new and multiple causal paths, and to explain individual cases of study, adding robustness to methodological gaps presented by the quantitative data. Therefore, mixed methods can be used as an epistemological reassurance of the results found by each research method individually.
Methodological pluralism and eclecticism focus on the process of mixing various methods, rather than the classification of each type of methods. According to Langford, ‘to attain the mantle of mixed methods there must be some integration, active mixture of methods through design and implementation’ (M Langford, ‘Mixed Methods in Human Rights’ in B Andreassen, H-O Sano and C Methven O'Brien (eds.) Research Methods in Human Rights: A Handbook (Edward Elgar, 2nd Ed, 2023). They can include, for instance, traditional doctrinal approaches, legal theory techniques, empirical methods from the social and natural sciences, and textual analysis and archival methods from the humanities.
Mixed methods can be employed in both the stages of the research, i.e. data collection and analysis and can combine both textual analysis and empirical legal research with quantitative and qualitative methods. In empirical legal research, qualitative interviews are often used as a research method in social and political science, where they are considered an effective means to elicit information not only on political but also on social behaviour.
An empirical study with the use of mixed methods was applied in the ongoing research on “Expanding access to international justice: The participation of State and Non-State Actors before international courts and tribunals”, incorporated both qualitative (conceptualization) and quantitative (data and textual analysis) research methods. The first systematic empirical analysis in the specialized literature to map the participation of State and NSAs in the ICJ's contentious cases and advisory proceedings.
Complex research methodology was also applied in “The Normative Legitimacy of the World Health Organisation in Brazil”. The project is developed in partnership between the Centre of Global Law (CPDG) and the FGV's School of Applied Mathematics (EMAp). In collaboration with Queen Mary and Fiocruz, this innovative research project in the field of law, health and mathematics aims to evaluate the impact of WHO norms on domestic legal systems. This research employs automated search methodology, such as natural language processing techniques and statistical methods for textual analysis. Natural Language Processing techniques, such as different types of vectorization (or embedding) and informational clustering techniques will be tested to determine the semantic proximity of the national documents and each WHO regulation. Statistical models aim to describe the chains of influence between an international organization’s normative instruments and the different branches of a national legal system.