Anusooya Sivaganesan

Anusooya Sivaganesan is doing her research on “Forced to marry. A human rights violation within its Euro-Asian entanglements. Unfree marriages from a multi-country perspective exemplified by Switzerland, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Turkey”, for which she was awarded a 3-year grant at the University of Zurich. In 2016, she was selected as one of the Junior Fellowship at the Erasmus School of Law, Rotterdam. Her research aims to scrutinize the extent to which current legal procedures against forced marriage owe to the basic principle of the right to marry according to one’s “free and full consent” (cf. article 16, paragraph 2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) and how do such tendencies interact with contemporary debates and ascriptions surrounding identity, culture and migration. Her research is the first attempt to highlight how forced marriage form an multi entangled perspective in the socio-legal discipline. Therefore, investigating the legal measures surrounding the phenomenon of forced marriages and the needs to be complimented with the insights from the socio-legal aspect.

She has conducted her field work so far in Turkey, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the Netherlands. During her research stays she was affiliated at the University of Istanbul with Prof. Dr. Adem Sözüer and at the Middle East Technical University, Department Sociology, Chair Gender and Women’s Studies Graduate Program, Prof. Yıldız Ecevit in Ankara, Turkey (2014). In 2015, she was awarded with the Van Calker Scholarship by the Swiss Institute of Comparative Law. After finishing her research sojourn in Sri Lanka (2015) at the University of Peradeniya and at the Law Faculty of the University of Colombo, she continued the research in Pakistan (2015) at the Department of Sociology, Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad. In addition, she was affiliated at the Department of Sociology, University of San Diego as a visiting PhD-scholar (2015-2016). Currently, she continues her empirical work in England while staying at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford.

Anusooya Sivganesan holds a Law degree from the University of Zurich.