Ben Grama

Ben Grama is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Human Rights Centre of Ghent University. He is part of the inter-institutional multidisciplinary iBOF project “Future-proofing human rights: Developing thicker forms of accountability”. His work focuses on devising a thick conception of accountability drawing on the overall research findings of the IBOF project. 

In his doctoral research project, Whose Norms Whose Governance? Company-Administered Grievance Mechanisms, Access to Remedy and Human Rights, Ben carried out socio-legal research on how corporations handle grievances of human rights abuses from communities adversely affected by their activities. His main research interests are accountability, norm diffusion, access to remedy, and business and human rights. 

Ben previously worked for human rights NGOs, Amnesty International Netherlands, Pax and Oxfam Novib on human rights capacity-building and responsible banking.

Ben Grama’s postdoctoral research project seeks to synthesise the findings from the IBOF projects. Ben works to foster interdisciplinary collaborations between researchers on human rights accountability and to produce new cross-cutting insights from very disparate topics and areas. It starts from the perspective of identifying key choices, dilemmas, and trade-offs in current approaches with the ultimate ambition of producing a normatively anchored, contextually sensitive, and empirically grounded conception (or conceptions) of accountability.