transnational activism

This paper illustrates how varieties of cosmopolitanism are shaped through a mutually constitutive set of cultural dispositions and institutional practices that emerge at the interstices of global human right norms and local legal practices. Converging pressures of ‘cosmopolitan imperatives’ and the multiplicity of particularized manifestations are co‐evolving in the context of intercrossings during which distinctive cosmopolitanisms are established.

A variety of social movements are coalescing into transnational networks that oppose the polarizing in-equalities, unaccountable corporate power, and declining social and environmental health of free trade. In the process of sharing grievances and resources, many movements are forging cross-border networks and shaping the beginnings of transnational civil societies.

We focus on a central aspect of Blau and Moncada's argument: that a wider range of human rights violations ought to be regarded as justiciable, legally actionable, and formally criminalized. Although we share their normative goals, the turn to law they advocate also presents us with concerns. Our goal is to induce a reflexivity about our scholarly and political tools: we interrogate the turn to law in determining the content,scope, and solution for human rights violations by flagging some of how law operates in transnational context.

This study explores, with quantitative data analyses, why nation-states with very negative human rights records tend to sign and ratify human rights treaties at rates similar to those of states with positive records.

The international diffusion of similar laws and policies across nations is now a well-covered theme in sociology, but no one has yet asked what these similar laws and policies mean. We take the case of anti-female-genital-cutting policies in Egypt, Tanzania, and the U.S. and turn our attention to how local political situations interacted with international discourse. Functional relevance and international standing combined to affect levels of contestation.

This article discusses the transformation of the classical nation-state, as articulated in contemporary struggles for recognition. Elaborating neoinstitutional world polity theory, it analyses global institutional changes that underlie those transformations. It is claimed that the worldwide diffusion of the classical nation-state model itself has had paradoxical consequences, which have in the long run generated a new model of multicultural citizenship, legitimating the decoupling of state membership, individual rights and national identity.

In the last decade, human trafficking has emerged as a new area of research for sociologists and other scholars across a wide range of fields. Globalization has exacerbated the illicit trade of people and their parts within and across territorial borders, generating concern among activists and academics and prompting the development of a burgeoning literature with varying concerns and viewpoints. This article reviews what we know about human trafficking dynamics and trends, its causes, and current responses, including critiques of anti-trafficking efforts.

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) employs creative playfulness and subversive storytelling in their human rights campaigns and solidarity-building practices.

The Olympic Games are increasingly used by non-governmental organizations to demand transnational forms of accountability from public authorities. This article assesses the effectiveness of transnational public opinion surrounding the Beijing 2008 Olympics, when the pressure of Western public opinion was exerted upon the government of the world's most populous non-Western nation to improve its human rights record.

This article examines the mutually constitutive relationship between global institutions and local social movements. First, drawing on social movement theories and the world society approach, it develops a theoretical framework for understanding the transformative impact of global human rights on local activism.