Sub-Saharan Africa

The authors examine the impact of the international human rights regime on governments' human rights practices.

Much research has shown human rights treaties to be ineffective or even counterproductive, often contributing to greater levels of abuse among countries that ratify them. This article reevaluates the effect of four core human rights treaties on a variety of human rights outcomes. Unlike previous studies, it disaggregates treaty membership to examine the effect of relatively “stronger” and “weaker” commitments.

In this paper, I examine the relationship between sociology and the human rights dis- course. A major segment of the discourse is between Western and nonwestern scholars join- ing the debate from a wide variety of disciplines including law, political science, economics, and demography (Ake 1987; An-Na’im and Deng 1990; Ihonvbere 1994; Kabeer 1994; Mutua 1995; Sen, et al. 1994; Xing 1996, etc.). Sociology has made a poor showing. Perhaps this is due to the more general problem that the discipline, as a whole, lags behind others in applying itself to the human rights debate.

This article argues that the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann prepares the ground for a genuinely sociological theory of human rights. Through a presentation of Luhmann’s work on human rights, it describes the historical and sociological processes that make visible why human rights emerge as a central feature of modern society. It is argued that the emergence of fundamental freedoms and human rights can be related to the dominant structure of modern society, that is, functional differentiation.

This interdisciplinary article argues that human rights must be understood in terms of opportunities for social participation and that social and economic rights are integral to any discussion of the subject. We offer both a social constructionist and a normative framework for a sociology of human rights which reaches beyond liberal individualism, combining insights from the work of Amartya Sen and from French convention theory. Following Sen, we argue that human rights are founded on the promotion of human capabilities as ethical demands shaped by public reasoning.

A key challenge to understanding the eruption of globalization protest since the late 1990s is the lack of data on the protesters themselves. Although scholars have focused increasingly on these large protest events and the transnational social movements that play a role organizing them, information about the protesters remains scant. We address this research gap by analyzing survey data collected from a random sample of protesters at five globalization protests in three countries.

What factors determine whether and how deeply countries will commit to the international human rights regime? Using data for up to 142 countries between 1966 and 2000, this article analyzes patterns of membership to the International Human Rights Covenants. The analysis produced two main conclusions. First, the potential costs associated with joining a treaty, rather than its substantive content, motivates the decision to join.

Evidence of protest expansion both in the United States and abroad has stimulated theoretical discussion of a “movement society,” with some arguing that protest activities are becoming a standard feature of democratic politics. In advancing this claim, many have highlighted the role of domestic factors—for example, generational change or economic affluence—without fully accounting for the possibility that international dynamics may play an important role as well.

This research seeks to understand the factors that lead nation‐states to ratify international human rights treaties in the contemporary world, despite their potential cost for state sovereignty. We argue that normative pressure from international society, along with historical contingencies during the Cold War, encouraged many states to ratify these treaties. We present an event‐history analysis of ratification of seven key international human rights treaties in 164 countries in the period between 1965 and 2001.

This study provides a first descriptive mapping of support for women’s equal rights in 34 African countries and assesses diverse theoretical explanations for variability in this support. Contrary to stereotypes of a homogeneously tradition-bound continent, African citizens report high levels of agreement with gender equality that are more easily understood with reference to global processes of ideational diffusion than to country-level differences in economic modernization or women’s public-sphere roles.