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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. A second set of themes focuses on a dominant global policy context related to ungoverned territories, failed and fragile states and state-building – and the need to develop counterinsurgency states. These two sets of themes currently complement each other and their exploration is intended to demonstrate how a broader geosociology can expand our understanding of human rights beyond the often narrow, normative disciplinary frames within which they are commonly situated.

This book argues that the colonial confrontation was central to the formation of international law and, in particular, its founding concept, sovereignty. Traditional histories of the discipline present colonialism and non-European peoples as peripheral concerns. By contrast, Anghie argues that international law has always been animated by the ‘civilizing mission’—the project of governing non-European peoples, and that the economic exploitation and cultural subordination that resulted were constitutively significant for the discipline. In developing these arguments, the book examines different phases of the colonial encounter, ranging from the sixteenth century to the League of Nations period and the current ‘war on terror.’ Anghie provides a new approach to the history of international law, illuminating the enduring imperial character of the discipline and its continuing importance for peoples of the Third World. This book will be of interest to students of international law and relations, history, post-colonial studies and development studies.

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 study's core arguments are (1) that the deepening international human rights regime creates opportunities for rights-violating governments to display low-cost legitimating commitments to world norms, leading them to ratify human rights treaties without the capacity or willingness to comply with the provisions; and (2) that among repressive regimes, autonomous ones that are less constrained by domestic forces are more likely to ratify human rights treaties as symbolic commitment, because these sovereigns are free to entertain high levels of decoupling between policy and practice, while constrained governments are more reluctant to incite domestic (and foreign) oppositions and interest groups. The combined outcome is that repressive states ratify human rights treaties at least as frequently as non-repressive ones — particularly those repressive states that have greater autonomy. Our cross-national time-series analyses provide supportive evidence for these arguments.

 In 2010, Jamaican police and military forces entered the West Kingston community of Tivoli Gardens to apprehend Christopher “Dudus” Coke, who had been ordered for extradition to the United States on gun and drug-running charges. By the time Coke was detained, somewhere between seventy-five and two hundred civilians had been killed. In Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation, Deborah A. Thomas uses the incursion as a point of departure for theorizing the roots of contemporary state violence in Jamaica and in post-plantation societies in general. Drawing on visual, oral historical, and colonial archives, Thomas traces the long-term legacies of the plantation system and how its governing logics continue to shape and replicate forms of violence. She places affect at the center of sovereignty to destabilize disembodied narratives of liberalism and progress and to raise questions about recognition, repair, and accountability. In tying theories of politics, colonialism, race, and affect together with Jamaica's history, Thomas presents a robust framework for understanding what it means to be human in the plantation's wake.

The central question of the Arab Spring—what democracies should look like in the deeply religious countries of the Middle East—has developed into a vigorous debate over these nations’ secular identities. But what, exactly, is secularism? What has the West’s long familiarity with it inevitably obscured? In Questioning Secularism, Hussein Ali Agrama tackles these questions. Focusing on the fatwa councils and family law courts of Egypt just prior to the revolution, he delves deeply into the meaning of secularism itself and the ambiguities that lie at its heart.

Drawing on a precedent-setting case arising from the family law courts —the last courts in Egypt to use Shari‘a law—Agrama shows that secularism is a historical phenomenon that works through a series of paradoxes that it creates. Digging beneath the perceived differences between the West and Middle East, he highlights secularism’s dependence on the law and the problems that arise from it: the necessary involvement of state sovereign power in managing the private spiritual lives of citizens and the irreducible set of legal ambiguities such a relationship creates. Navigating a complex landscape between private and public domains, Questioning Secularism lays important groundwork for understanding the real meaning of secularism as it affects the real freedoms of a citizenry, an understanding of the utmost importance for so many countries that are now urgently facing new political possibilities.

This article explores the dilemmas of the sociology of human rights – a growing field of academic research. Sociologists are increasingly conceptualizing poverty, global economic inequality, and social inequalities of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation not as social problems, but rather as human rights abuses. The shift of emphasis from the social problems perspective to the human rights perspective demands a different set of remedies from IGOs, national governments, and local authorities. Whereas in the past sociologists tended either to recommend modifications to social policies or to propose large-scale social transformation, they now find themselves advocating the implementation of human rights on the global, national, and local levels. This has brought sociologists into the area of global governance. The process of delineating an explicitly sociological perspective on human rights is impeded by two overlapping dilemmas: (1) the tension between an approach that emphasizes the analysis of ‘rights effects’ on the global, national, and local levels and an approach that stresses the advocacy of rights as a palliative for social inequalities; and (2) the tension between an interdisciplinary vision, in which sociology would join other disciplines in illuminating human rights and a unidisciplinary vision, in which sociologists and their allies would push for a unified social science founded on human rights.

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. World polity institutionalists expect ratification to be loosely coupled with a country's conduct or its political, ideological, or cultural commitments, although this gap narrows as compliance is more effectively enforced. A civilizations approach predicts tight coupling between ratification and cultural values, regardless of the mechanisms in place for enforcing compliance. Results lend partial support to rationalism and world polity theory, whereas the clash of civilizations thesis is much less successful in accounting for patterns of ratification. Furthermore, the costs of ratifying a treaty, considered in terms of its surveillance and enforcement provisions, influence rates of accession more than the specific rights a treaty protects.

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. Through the analytic prism of historical memories – which refers to shared understandings specific pasts carry for present concerns of a political community – we provide an explanatory factor for the salience of human rights norms as a globally available repertoire of legitimate claim making. While states retain most of their sovereign functions, their legitimacy is no longer exclusively conditioned by a contract with the nation, but also by their adherence to a set of nation-transcending human rights ideals. Legitimacy is mediated by how willing states are to engage with ‘judicial memories’ of human rights abuses and their articulation in cosmopolitan legal frames. Empirically, we focus on war crime trials and how legal inscriptions of memories of human rights abuses are recasting the jurisdiction of International Law. The readiness of states to engage with rights abuses is becoming politically and culturally consequential, as adherence to global human rights norms confers legitimacy.

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.

The essay examines some of the changes in the author’s thinking about the politics of engaging in international law since the original publication of the article that opened the first issue of EJIL in 1990. The essay points to the change of focus from indeterminacy (to which the author is as committed as ever) of legal arguments to the structural biases of international institutions. It then discusses the politics of definition, that is to say, the strategic practice of defining international situations and problems in new expert languages so as to gain control over them. It attacks the increasing ‘managerialism’ in the field and ends with a few reflections about the significance of the moment of the establishment of the Journal 20 years ago.