Latin America/Caribbean

Women's political representation, once considered unacceptable by politicians and their publics, is now actively encouraged by powerful international actors. In this article, the authors ask how the growth and discourse of the international women's movement affected women's acquisition of political power over time. To answer this question, they use event history techniques to address women's political representation in more than 150 countries over 110 years (1893–2003).

A recurring theme in the sociology of human rights is the vast decoupling that exists between the formal codification of these rights in principle and their implementation in practice, fueling much debate about the effectiveness of international law. Yet, despite this disjuncture, a deeper question remains: given all the barriers that have impeded the realization of human rights, why have they become so widely institutionalized?

World polity theorists suggest that, over the last half century, policies on homosexuality have been liberalized throughout the world; other scholars argue that gay rights continue to face strong, possibly growing opposition. This article takes a different perspective. I argue that the global social space has grown increasingly articulated around homosexuality. Drawing on data from 174 countries between 1970 and 2015, I analyze the novel adoption of rationalized state policies regarding same-sex sexuality, evidenced by the rise of both supportive and repressive laws.

Most studies of rape-law reform outcomes focus on single cases. We advance this literature by studying outcomes more systematically—leveraging new cross-national and longitudinal reform data—and showing that reform outcomes have both global and national determinants. Our exploratory analyses show three main findings: (1) Rape-law reforms are strongly associated with elevated police reporting between 1945 and 2005. (2) The strength of the association depends on domestic contexts.

Recent decades are marked by an impressive expansion of actors and legal structures intended to globally extend a certain ‘Western’ catalog of human rights. Recently, too, legal scholars have developed concepts to justify normatively the expansion of human rights (e.g. Habermas, Walker, Koskenniemi).

This article analyses the creation of new human rights by a contemporary transnational agrarian movement, Vía Campesina. It makes the case that the movement’s assertion of new rights contributes to shaping a cosmopolitan, multicultural, and anti-hegemonic conception of human rights. It discusses the advantages and constraints of the human rights framework and analyses the creation of new rights by the movement as a way to overcome the limitations of the ‘rights master frame’. It concludes with a discussion of some of the challenges involved in the institutionalization of new rights.

This study examines the major factors that predict states’ repressive policies, focusing on the relationship between oppositional terror attacks and state repression of core human rights. We rely on a theoretical framework that brings together actor-oriented explanations and socio-cultural approaches. While the former emphasize purposive rational action, international pressures, and domestic threats, the latter focus on the power of ideas and on processes of policy diffusion and cultural norms.

This paper examines how global interdependencies and the consolidation of a human rights discourse are transforming national sovereignty. Social researchers frequently address the supremacy of state sovereignty and the absoluteness of human rights as mutually exclusive categories. However, rather than presupposing that a universal rights discourse is necessarily leading to the demise of sovereignty, we suggest that an increasingly de-nationalized conception of legitimacy is contributing to a reconfiguration of sovereignty itself.

This article examines whether the content of the International Human Rights Covenants and the costs associated with their ratification influence the decision of countries to join. The author evaluates three theoretical perspectives-rationalism, world polity institutionalism, and the clash of civilizations-with data for more than 130 countries between 1966 and 1999. Rationalists contend that treaty ratification is tightly coupled with internal sovereignty arrangements, human rights practices, and ideological commitments, all of which become more important as treaty enforcement strengthens.

This article aims at drawing on sociological insights into reconciliation processes which emerge out of ethnic, national and state conflicts. First, the concept of reconciliation is interrogated as an instrument for sociological enquiry. The article locates the concept’s lexical origins in western/northern Christian traditions and identifies the usages of religious connotations in secularised strands of conflict resolution theory and praxis.