Human rights and environmental policy: Visiting poli-sci scholar Maria Armoudian brings wealth of knowledge to UH Hilo community

Visiting scholar Maria Armoudian, from the University of Aukland, New Zealand, was on campus for a month sharing her expertise on human rights and environmental policy.

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By Susan Enright.

An expert in international and Indigenous human rights and environmental policy from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, visited the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo last month as the 2024 Political Science Department’s Visiting Scholar.

While in residence in UH Hilo’s political science department Sept. 24-Oct. 23, Maria Armoudian shared her knowledge with faculty and students and delivered two lectures about her research. Armoudian is an award-winning researcher, professor, author, broadcaster, and former public official and journalist. Her awards include the Royal Society Early Career Research Award and Human Rights Book of the Year. She has published widely on human rights, media and communication, sustainability, and good government.

Before academia, Armoudian was a commissioner in the City of Los Angeles, worked in the California State Legislature, and served on nonprofit boards including the Los Angeles Press Club, the League of Conservation Voters, and others.

“Dr. Armoudian’s presence on our campus as the 2024 Political Science Department’s Visiting Scholar was really a wonderful thing for our students,” says Sarah Marusek, UH Hilo professor of political science and chair of the department. “She shared new research avenues and perspectives that compelled students to think about the world in new and interesting ways.”

Human rights

Armoudian delivered a public lecture Oct. 16 on the UH Hilo campus presenting her published research, Lawyers Beyond Borders: Advancing International Human Rights Through Local Laws and Courts (University of Michigan Press, 2021), where she examines civil litigation strategies to remedy human rights violations.

These symbolic uses of the court, through the practice of universal jurisdiction and the Alien Tort Statute (a section in the United States Code that gives federal courts jurisdiction over lawsuits filed by foreign nationals for torts committed in violation of international law) provided some relief for victims and punishment for corporate wrongdoers.

Lawyers Beyond Borders is about agency. It is about how, in the face of powerful interests and seemingly insurmountable obstacles—political, psychological, economic, geographical, and physical—a small group of lawyers and survivors navigated a terrain of daunting barriers to begin building, case-by-case, new pathways to justice for those who otherwise would have none.

Environmental policy

Armoudian gave a second research lecture Oct. 17 to Marusek’s class on Politics of the Ordinary (POLS 201), an introductory course to political theory. In this lecture, the visiting scholar focused on the politics of conservation.

“This semester, our class is focused on environmental political theory, which worked really well with Maria’s research into the New Zealand-based politics of extinction,” says Marusek.

The lecture, based on Armoudian’s published paper, “The Politics of Animal Extinction and Conservation: Interests, Framing, and Policy” (Journal of Political Ecology, 2023) covered the crisis of the sixth mass extinction underway on the planet, the conflicts of “green economies” drawing conservationists to partner with destructive entities, the ways conservationists work for “win-win” situations yet empower extractive industries and sustain extinctions, and about how a core problem is the “trifecta” of 1) political structures, 2) economic systems, and 3) communication framing that upholds economic and political systems and structures.

She also explored “Māori values v. colonizing consciousness” within the context of Indigenous rights.

Armoudian posits solutions that encompass debate about the political-economic structures and the values that are pushing the environmental crises, transparency about root causes, and deliberative democracy that is representative of an area’s population. Learning and understanding is at the core of the visiting scholar’s proposed solutions, empowering citizens and building trust. She cites the successes of this strategy as found in Belgium, Australia, Netherlands, and other countries.

UH Hilo political science major Mark Rebellon who attended Armoudian’s lectures, says her teachings give people a way to wake up “because our world is now changing, particularly due to climate change.”

“We must realize that wealth is not only about the money we have but our world having many resources that can make us wealthy in non-monetary ways,” says Rebellon. “If we don’t wake up now, maybe wealth in our world will be gone soon because of climate change.”

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Story by Susan Enright, a public information specialist for the Office of the Chancellor and editor of UH Hilo Stories. She received her bachelor of arts in English and certificate in women’s studies from UH Hilo.