In Pursuit of Consensus: Mapping Consensus-building Processes at CD, ITU and UNGA

PhD project dedicated to investigating global governance mechanisms of consensus building in multilateral negotiations concerning outer space. Specifically, this interdisciplinary project uses a combination of ethnographic methods and comparative discourse analysis to map decision-making processes at the Conference on Disarmament, International Telecommunication Union and UN General Assembly to answer why states succeed in building consensus in some cases and not in others. Three-level analytical framework investigating (a) formal institutions, (b) interactions & practices, and (c) transnational policy networks is proposed to map a wide variety of negotiation facets. The goal of this project is to produce a set of testable hypotheses as well as to come up with possible insights how to set up international consensus-based negotiations to affect the likelihood of their success.