Sociology

Recent years have seen a surge of interest in applying the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu in international studies as part of a more general sociological turn observable in both international and European studies. However, different from earlier attempts at deploying Bourdieusian sociology in the context of international law, economics, and politics, most of this new Bourdieu-inspired constructivist political science research only marginally addresses what in many ways was the cardinal point of Bourdieu's work: his attempt at devising a reflexive sociology.

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.

This paper re-examines the sociological study of resistance in light of growing interest in the concept of affect. Recent claims that we are witness to an ‘affective turn’ and calls for a ‘new sociological empiricism’ sensitive to affect indicate an emerging paradigm shift in sociology. Yet, mainstream sociological study of resistance tends to have been largely unaffected by this shift. To this end, this paper presents a case for the significance of affect as a lens by which to approach the study of resistance.

There is a wealth of evidence that disabled people experience far higher levels of unemployment and underemployment than non-disabled peers. Yet hitherto sociologists have paid scant attention to the structural causes of this issue. Drawing on a socio/political or social model of disability perspective this paper argues for a reconfiguration of the meaning of disability and work in order to address this problem. It is also suggested that such a strategy will make a significant contribution to the struggle for a fairer and equitable global society.

Why do certain protests prompt more intervention from the police? And why does the intensity of intervention vary over time? Drawing on analytical approaches in the protest policing literature, and on studies investigating the relationship between civil conflict, public opinion, and state repression, this study examines whether pro-Kurdish events in Turkey are treated more severely than others, and how the policing of these protests changes over time. Based on an original dataset, we analyze more than 10,000 protest events that took place in Turkey between 2000 and 2009.

This article examines how judicial human rights in Europe have adopted the security politics that have swept across Europe in recent years and how, through the European Court of Human Rights’ (ECtHR)decision‐making over the veil they have contributed to the precarity of the Muslim woman’s body. While suffering from stigmatization through securitization of the veil (I am using ‘veil’ to describe various garments such as the hijab, niqab and burqa.

Some images stick out in the collective memory of mankind and become icons for a whole generation. Among the most forceful images of our generation are the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, on 11 September 2001. These attacks revealed a new face of terrorism at the dawn of the 21st century, with new targets and new means, intended to produce many indiscriminate victims and without any concern for the offenders to save their own lives.

Using historical analysis of the inclusiveness of Labor Department affirmative action regulations for African‐Americans, American Indians, Asian Americans, Latinos, women, and white ethnics, this article shows that understanding variations in social movement success requires understanding policy‐elite perceptions of the meanings of social movements and the groups they represent. Variation in perceived meanings along dimensions of definition, morality, or threat helps explain the speed of group inclusion, the amount of mobilization needed, and possiblity for failure.

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.

Although the study of citizenship has been an important development in contemporary sociology, the nature of rights has been largely ignored. The analysis of human rights presents a problem for sociology, in which cultural relativism and the fact-value distinction have largely destroyed the classical tradition of the natural-law basis for rights discourse. This critique of the idea of universal rights was prominent in the work of Marx, Durkheim and Weber.