Sociology

Since the late 1990s, a growing body of literature has researched the cross-national diffusion of policies that affect lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) communities. Studies stemming from world society consider how state ties to newly emergent global norms regarding the treatment of LGBT communities are a driver of this process. A shortcoming of these studies, however, is that they do not adequately consider which type of ties to global norms are most meaningful for policy adoption.

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

A temporal overlap involving the constructivist turn in sociology and national and transnational human rights struggles has transformed human rights into an important research topic within political sociology.This article establishes the principal sociopolitical research questions in the field of human rights and conducts a review of academic literature on the subject, establishing three main fields of human rights research within the sub-discipline: human rights as the articulating axis for collective action; subject participation in the construction of discourse and the effects of dominat

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.

The article explores a range of themes in the sociology of human rights that arise from recent transformations of war and warfare. Despite declining armed conflict since the end of the Cold War, much military discourse in the post-9/11 context maintains an apocalyptic vision of global threats and total wars. One set of themes relates to changes in the nature and means of wars, such as the use of drones, the robotics revolution and complex irregular warfare.

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.

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 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.