Tamsin S. Mitchell

Dr Tamsin Mitchell is a Visiting Researcher and former ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Freedom of the Media (CFOM), Department of Journalism, University of Sheffield. She completed her PhD in Politics at the University of York’s Centre for Applied Human Rights in 2021, also funded by the ESRC. Since then, Tamsin has worked as an independent researcher and consultant, with clients including the Office of the United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and the European Parliament’s Subcommittee on Human Rights. She has many years’ prior experience of working in the international human rights and development sector, including managing programmes of research and advocacy in Latin America and Africa for PEN International from 2007-2016, providing support to writers and journalists at risk.

Tamsin's new book, 'Human Rights, Impunity and Anti-Press Violence: How Journalists Survive and Resist' (Routledge Advances in International Relations and Global Politics, 2025), is a qualitative, comparative and interdisciplinary exploration of journalists’ responses to impunity for anti-press violence in two Latin American partial democracies, Mexico and Honduras. It is the first book-length analysis of the security and protection of journalists who can also be seen as human rights defenders. The book draws on 89 interviews with such journalist-defenders and organisations that support them, carried out in 2018 and 2022/23. It shows how journalists use several interlinked strategies to seek justice and protection: domestic and international strategies (“protection approaches,” or making rights demands of the state, often via intermediaries), and activist and professional strategies (“self-protection approaches”).

Critical of international relations scholarly debates on the value of international human rights law/norms to local civil society, Tamsin demonstrates that while protection approaches based on such standards are important and valued, they are not enough: self-protection is central – and increasingly so. She advocates the need to take a more bottom-up and inclusive approach to civil society and the importance of alternative, non-legal norms in (self-)protection and truth- and justice-seeking.