U.S./Canada

The theory of cultural trauma focuses on the relationship between shared suffering and collective identity: Events become traumatic when they threaten a group’s foundational self-understanding. As it stands, the theory has illuminated profound parallels in societal suffering across space and time. Yet focusing on identity alone cannot explain the considerable differences that scholars document in the outcomes of the trauma process.

This article examines the effects of an uncertain legal status on the lives of immigrants, situating their experiences within frameworks of citizenship/belonging and segmented assimilation, and using Victor Turner's concept of liminality and Susan Coutin's "legal nonexistence." It questions black-and-white conceptualizations of documented and undocumented immigration by exposing the gray area of "liminal legality" and examines how this in-between status affects the individual's social networks and family, the place of the church in immigrants' lives, and the broader domain of artistic expre

Much of what is known about how the law operates is based on the criminal justice process. What is less understood is whether legal, extra-legal, and organizational attributes matter for non-criminal justice processes, such as discrimination and employment disputes. It is this general issue that we examine in this paper. We also incorporate how the development of the legal construct of sexual harassment affects case settlement. Our study attempts to overcome the underutilization of theoretical understandings from the sociology of law to study sexual harassment complaints.

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.

Are recent trends in international law supporting child rights and promoting neoliberal economic reforms complementary or contradictory? To answer this question, we identify the component parts of child rights mobilization, recent global economic reforms, and child rights outcomes to theorize the particular relationships among them.

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.

The institutionalization of distinct collective memories of hate and cultural traumas as law and bureaucracy is examined comparatively for the case of hate crime law. A dehistoricized focus on individual victimization and an avoidance of major episodes of domestic atrocities in the United States contrast with a focus on the Holocaust, typically in the context of the destruction of the democratic state, in Germany.

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.

Adopting a long-term historical perspective, this article examines the growing complexity and the internal tensions of state protection in Western Europe and North America. Beginning with Charles Tilly's theory about state building and organized crime, the discussion follows with a critical analysis of T. H. Marshall's article on citizenship.