Virtual Library

National human rights institutions, defined as domestic but globally legitimated agencies charged with promoting and protecting human rights, have emerged worldwide. This article examines the effect of these organizations on two kinds of human rights outcomes: physical integrity rights and civil and political rights. We analyze cross-national longitudinal data using regression models that account for the endogeneity of organizational formation. Our first main finding is that all types of human rights institutions improve long-term physical integrity outcomes but not civil and political rights practices. This finding may reflect a greater worldwide focus on physical integrity violations such as torture, and also many countries’ propensity to resist Western civil and political rights standards. A second main finding is that time matters: in the cases we observe, initial increases in rated abuse levels were followed by improvements. These initial increases may be due to closer scrutiny or the expanded scope of what constitutes human rights abuses. Our results call for rethinking the concept of decoupling in the sociology of human rights and other focal areas.

Drawing on Austin’s speech act theory and on related theories of performativity and positioning, this article analyses the public confessions during the 1990s by three prominent state actors in Turkey about their direct involvement in state crimes against Kurds and left-wing political opponents. All three cases received significant media attention at the time. The aim of the article is not only to shed new light on those specific confessions by the perpetrators within the Turkish context, but also to develop further theoretical insights into the phenomenon of public confessions as such. Whilst confessions of this kind are often welcomed and portrayed as truth-statements that are cathartic and enable society to move forward, this analysis demonstrates that the reality is often more complex as the confessions in question tend to go hand in hand with a disavowal of individual responsibility by the perpetrators involved.

The concern with ethics in North American cultural anthropology discourages political economy research on unequal power relations and other 'dangerous' subjects. US anthropologists define ethics in narrow, largely methodological terms - informed consent, respect for traditional institutions, responsibility to future researchers, legal approval by host nations, and so on. The responsibility of the researcher to uphold 'human rights' or to document political repression and suffering is not merely dismissed by mainstream anthropology as a partisan issue outside the realm of scholarship, but is actually condemned as ethically problematic. The growing postmodernist deconstructivist approach within US anthropology allows ethnographers to obey their discipline's narrow ethical dictates through a reflexive investigation of the hermeneutics of signs and symbols devoid of political economic social context. Drawing on his fieldwork experiences in Central America, the author argues that anthropologists have a historical responsibility to address larger moral issues because their discipline's traditional research subjects - exotic others in remote Third World settings - are violently being incorporated into the world economy in a traumatic manner that often includes starvation, political repression, or even genocide. Meanwhile, in the name of ethics, North American anthropologists continue to ignore or avoid the human tragedies engulfing their 'research subjects'.

From the beginnings of the slave trade through colonization, the struggle for independence, Mobutu's brutal three decades of rule, and the civil war that has raged from 1996 to the present day, Congo: The Epic History of a People traces the history of one of the most devastated nations in the world. Esteemed scholar David Van Reybrouck balances hundreds of interviews with a diverse range of Congolese with meticulous historical research to construct a multidimensional portrait of a nation and its people. Epic in scope yet eminently readable, both penetrating and deeply moving, Congo—a finalist for the Cundill Prize—takes a deeply humane approach to political history, focusing squarely on the Congolese perspective, and returns a nation's history to its people.

Human rights entered the language and practice of humanitarian aid in the mid-1990s, and since then they have worked in parallel, complemented or competed with traditional frameworks ordering humanitarianism, including humanitarian principles, refugee law, and inter-agency standards. This article positions the study of rights within a sociology of praxis. It starts from a premise that interpretation and realisation of international norms depends on actors’ social negotiation. We seek to contribute to the sociology of rights with insights from legal pluralism and to analyse human rights as a semi-autonomous field in a multiplicity of normative frameworks. Based on cumulative research into humanitarian aid in disaster response, refugee care and protracted crises, the article explores how humanitarian agencies evoke different normative frameworks to legitimate their presence and programmes. How aid is shaped through the ‘rights speak’ of aid workers and recipients alike is illuminated by cases of programmes promoting women’s rights against sexual abuse from Kenya and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

World culture in the post-war era of rapid globalization is increasingly organized, rationalized, and ubiquitous. The core of world culture - rationalized science, technology, organization, professionalization, etc. - has been thoroughly institutionalized. For all kinds of actors, global principles and procedures for the production of identity, action, and progress have expanded. Ontologically, individualism has been rising rapidly while collective identities have also strengthened in some respects. Normatively, the global moral order has become increasingly organized and broadly activated, particularly in terms of the ideology of human rights. In a dualistic process, world culture generates both extensive homogenization and the legitimation of certain forms of difference. Though some countervailing forces are evident, world culture is likely to continue to become further codified, institutionalized, and consequential in coming decades.

The volume presents the changing situation of the Roma in the second half of the 20th century and examines the politics of the Hungarian state regarding minorities by analyzing legal regulations, policy documents, archival sources and sociological surveys. In the first phase analyzed (1945-61), the authors show the efforts of forced assimilation by the communist state. The second phase (1961-89) began with the party resolution denying nationality status to the Roma. Gypsy culture was equivalent with culture of poverty that must be eliminated. Forced assimilation through labor activities continued. The Roma adapted to new conditions and yet kept their distinct identity. From the 1970s, Roma intellectuals began an emancipatory movement, and its legacy is felt until this day. Although the third phase (1989-2010) brought about freedoms and rights for the Roma, with large sums spent on various Roma-related programs, the situation on the ground nevertheless did not improve. Segregation and marginalization continues, and it is rampant. The authors powerfully conclude: while Roma became part of the political community, they are still not part of the national one. Subjects: Romanies--Hungary. Romanies--Hungary--Social conditions. Marginality, Social--Hungary. Romanies--Legal status, laws, etc.--Hungary. Minorities--Government policy--Hungary. Hungary--Ethnic relations. Hungary--Social policy.

Pays d'Afrique équatoriale, le Mboasu se relève péniblement d'une sanglante guerre civile. Dans les quartiers mal famés de Sombé, la capitale, quadrillés par des bandes de rebelles reconvertis en trafiquants, prévalent désormais le chacun pour soi et la superstition... C'est ainsi que Musango, à peine âgée de neuf ans, est rejetée et abandonnée par sa mère qui l'accuse de porter malheur. Seule, sans famille ni ressources, la petite fille est d'abord recueillie, puis vendue comme esclave. Malgré les épreuves et les périls, elle s'accroche pourtant, lucide et tenace, à un unique espoir : retrouver sa mère et solder le passé pour, enfin, songer à envisager l'avenir.

Just about any social need is now met with an opportunity to "connect" through digital means. But this convenience is not free—it is purchased with vast amounts of personal data transferred through shadowy backchannels to corporations using it to generate profit. The Costs of Connection uncovers this process, this "data colonialism," and its designs for controlling our lives—our ways of knowing; our means of production; our political participation.

Colonialism might seem like a thing of the past, but this book shows that the historic appropriation of land, bodies, and natural resources is mirrored today in this new era of pervasive datafication. Apps, platforms, and smart objects capture and translate our lives into data, and then extract information that is fed into capitalist enterprises and sold back to us. The authors argue that this development foreshadows the creation of a new social order emerging globally—and it must be challenged. Confronting the alarming degree of surveillance already tolerated, they offer a stirring call to decolonize the internet and emancipate our desire for connection.