Dr. Lene Guercke
Dr. Lene Guercke
Institute of Political Science
Chair of Human Rights Politics
- Email: lene.guercke@fau.de
Since November 2025, Dr. Lene Guercke leads the transdisciplinary research project “Unmasking supply chains: leveraging digital human rights investigations for corporate accountability“. The project is a collaboration with the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) and funded by the Volkswagen Foundation’s Change! Fellowship.
Prior to joining FAU, Lene was a postdoctoral senior researcher for the Investigations Program at UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center, where she collaborated on several digital open source investigations. Her current research interests include corporate accountability, supply chains, open source investigations for human rights, and interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research.
Lene holds a PhD in Law from the University of Leuven (Belgium). Her doctoral thesis focused on state responsibility for disappearances committed by organised criminal groups and combined doctrinal legal research with qualitative empirical work. The research was published in 2025 in the book series Interdisciplinary Studies in Human Rights.
Outside of academia, Lene has worked as independent human rights researcher and consultant and spent several years working in civil society organisations in Mexico.
- 2025 – today VolkswagenFoundation Change! fellow and research group leader at FAU Chair for Human Rights Politics
- 2025 Fellow, GSO Leadership Academy
- 2024-2025 Postdoc, Human Rights Center, University of California Berkeley
- 2021-2023 Independent consultant, Brussels
- 2017-2021 Doctoral researcher in Law, University of Leuven
- ERC Project “’We are all Ayotzinapa’: The role of Digital Media in the Shaping of Transnational Memories on Disappearance”
- 2015-2017 Independent consultant, Mexico/remote
- 2015 MA Human Rights, University College London
- 2013-2014 Institutional Development Officer, Institute for Studies and Dissemination on Migration (INEDIM), Mexico City
- 2012 Administrative Consultant, UN Office on Drugs and Crime, Mexico City
- 2011 BA International Law and International Politics & Peace and Conflict Studies, London Metropolitan University
- Human rights in supply chains
- Corporate accountability
- Open source investigations for human rights
- Transdisciplinary research
- Interdisciplinary research
- Responsibility in international law
- Non-state actors in international law
Book
- Guercke, Lene (2025) Failure of the State: Organised Crime and Mexico’s Disappeared. Interdisciplinary Studies in Human Rights. Springer Cham. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-83717-3
Article
- Guercke, Lene (2021) State Responsibility for a Failure to Prevent Violations of the Right to Life by Organised Criminal Groups: Disappearances in Mexico, Human Rights Law Review, Vol. 21, Issue 2 (June 2021), pp. 329–357, https://doi.org/10.1093/hrlr/ngaa061
Book chapters
- Guercke, Lene (2025) Contemporary Disappearances in Mexico: a Conceptual Challenge for the International Framework on Enforced Disappearances. In: G. Baranowska, M. Kolaković-Bojović (Eds.) Enforced Disappearances: On Universal Responses to a Worldwide Phenomenon. CUP. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009461719.007
- Guercke, Lene (2022) State Acquiescence to Disappearances in the Context of Mexico’s ‘War on Drugs’. In: S. Mandolessi, K. Olalde Rico (Eds.), Disappearances in Mexico: From the “Dirty War” to the “War on Drugs”. Routledge. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781003169611-9
Other
- Guercke, Lene (2023). The Committee on Enforced Disappearances’ General Comment on Enforced Disappearance in the Context of Migration. Research Brief. Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights.