Virtual Library

How can we make sense of human rights in China's authoritarian Party-State system? Eva Pils offers a nuanced account of this contentious area, examining human rights as a set of social practices. Drawing on a wide range of resources including years of interaction with Chinese human rights defenders, Pils discusses what gives rise to systematic human rights violations, what institutional avenues of protection are available, and how social practices of human rights defence have evolved. 

Three central areas are addressed: liberty and integrity of the person; freedom of thought and expression; and inequality and socio-economic rights. Pils argues that the Party-State system is inherently opposed to human rights principles in all these areas, and that – contributing to a global trend – it is becoming more repressive. Yet, despite authoritarianism's lengthening shadows, China’s human rights movement has so far proved resourceful and resilient. The trajectories discussed here will continue to shape the struggle for human rights in China and beyond its borders.

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 domination and emancipation on this construction; and transformations to the category of citizenship resulting from the challenges posed by global migration

Institutions matter for the advancement of human rights in global health. Given the dramatic development of human rights under international law and the parallel proliferation of global institutions for public health, there arises an imperative to understand the implementation of human rights through global health governance. This volume examines the evolving relationship between human rights, global governance, and public health, studying an expansive set of health challenges through a multi-sectoral array of global organizations. To analyze the structural determinants of rights-based governance, the organizations in this volume include those international bureaucracies that implement human rights in ways that influence public health in a globalizing world. This volume brings together leading health and human rights scholars and practitioners from academia, non-governmental organizations, and the United Nations system. They explore the foundations of human rights as a normative framework for global health governance, the mandate of the World Health Organization to pursue a human rights-based approach to health, the role of inter-governmental organizations across a range of health-related human rights, the influence of rights-based economic governance on public health, and the focus on global health among institutions of human rights governance. Contributing chapters each map the distinct human rights efforts within a specific institution of global governance for health. Through the comparative institutional analysis in this volume, the contributing authors examine institutional dynamics to operationalize human rights in organizational policies, programs, and practices and assess institutional factors that facilitate or inhibit human rights mainstreaming for global health advancement.

These chapters by eight Korea specialists present a new approach to human rights issues in Korea. Instead of using an external and purely contemporary standard, the authors work from within Korean history, treating the successive phases of Korea’s modern century to examine the uneasy fate of human rights and some of the ideas of human rights as they have developed in the Korean context. Beginning with the Independence Club of the late nineteenth century and continuing through to the constitutional and judicial structures underlying the Sixth Republic Government of Roh Tae Woo in South Korea, these papers illuminate the sometimes complex interactions between modern Korean human-rights issues and the legacies of Korean culture and colonial occupation.

The contributors provide a corrective to two common errors: one, an overemphasis on the tension between residual Confucian culture and human-rights concepts; two, the opposite error, a defensive nationalism that gives rise to ill-founded efforts to identify democratic antecedents in the Korean past. Instead, these authors allow each episode in the emergence of Korean human rights thought and action to stand in the context of its own time and of Korea’s modern history. The final sections deal with the usefulness and appropriateness of U.S. policies toward human rights in South Korea and comparatively with the overall issues raised in the volume.

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) employs creative playfulness and subversive storytelling in their human rights campaigns and solidarity-building practices. The article focuses on three particular media to illustrate how they construct transnational solidarity: (1) son jarocho music as a medium for organizing the March for Rights, Respect, and Fair Food targeting Publix Supermarkets for human rights abuses like wage theft; (2) mística theater as a medium for organizing the Encuentro gathering to build their campaign against Wendy’s for failing to free their supply chain from worker abuse; and (3) a grassroots community museum as a medium for building support against slavery. Creative playfulness and subversive storytelling contribute to successes built on human rights principles and realized through corporate accountability strategies. The article describes these media, and shows how they overcome challenges of building transnational solidarity. Finally, it suggests how the CIW has influenced recent farmworker strikes in Mexico.

More than 35 years since the HIV/AIDS pandemic began, HIV continues to cause almost two million new infections each year, and the “end of AIDS” by 2030 remains elusive.1 Violations of human rights continue to fuel high rates of new infections among key populations and a generalized epidemic in much of sub-Saharan Africa. Meanwhile, as political shifts worldwide threaten not only HIV funding but also progress toward the globalization of human rights, civil society mobilization and advocacy founded firmly on human rights principles have a more vital role to play than ever. Encouragingly, there are numerous examples of successful integration of human rights-based approaches into HIV prevention and treatment initiatives, and evidence increasingly demonstrates that norms enshrining the respect, protection, and fulfillment of human rights can translate into improved public health.2 This essay will succinctly trace the historic emergence of human rights as an issue at the heart of the HIV/ AIDS response; it will then provide examples of progress and setbacks in recent years and consider the potential for rights promotion to address the structural drivers of HIV. Finally, it will consider how the primacy of human rights in HIV/AIDS has affected other fields of global health and will highlight the continuing imperative to work with civil society to protect and promote human rights to reduce the burden of HIV/AIDS.

Has there always been an inalienable "right to have rights" as part of the human condition, as Hannah Arendt famously argued? The contributions to this volume examine how human rights came to define the bounds of universal morality in the course of the political crises and conflicts of the twentieth century. Although human rights are often viewed as a self-evident outcome of this history, the essays collected here make clear that human rights are a relatively recent invention that emerged in contingent and contradictory ways. Focusing on specific instances of their assertion or violation during the past century, this volume analyzes the place of human rights in various arenas of global politics, providing an alternative framework for understanding the political and legal dilemmas that these conflicts presented. In doing so, this volume captures the state of the art in a field that historians have only recently begun to explore.

In this timely study of the historical, ideological, and formal interdependencies of the novel and human rights, Joseph Slaughter demonstrates that the twentieth-century rise of "world literature" and international human rights law are related phenomena.

Slaughter argues that international law shares with the modern novel a particular conception of the human individual. The Bildungsroman, the novel of coming of age, fills out this image, offering a conceptual vocabulary, a humanist social vision, and a narrative grammar for what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and early literary theorists both call "the free and full development of the human personality."

Revising our received understanding of the relationship between law and literature, Slaughter suggests that this narrative form has acted as a cultural surrogate for the weak executive authority of international law, naturalizing the assumptions and conditions that make human rights appear commonsensical. As a kind of novelistic correlative to human rights law, the Bildungsroman has thus been doing some of the sociocultural work of enforcement that the law cannot do for itself.

Slaughter raises important practical and ethical questions that we must confront in advocating for human rights and reading world literature--imperatives that, today more than ever, are intertwined.

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. Considering the ever-increasing notion that LGBT rights are human rights, this study contrasts the role of human rights international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) and LGBT INGOs on LGBT policy diffusion between 1991 and 2015. While previous studies assume a global norm exists, focus on a narrow band of policies, or restrict analyses to key geographic areas, this study develops a new measure of global LGBT norms and offers a comprehensive LGBT Policy Index for a global sample of 156 countries. Through pooled cross-sectional time series with fixed effects, the results demonstrate that human rights INGOs are not adequate vehicles for pressuring national adoption of LGBT policies. Instead, targeted advocacy efforts, embodied through LGBT INGOs, are required in order for policy adoption to transpire.

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. Using interviews and archival and other data sources, the empirical analysis demonstrates that global human rights galvanized (1) the politically dormant Ainu into a thriving indigenous rights movement, (2) the politically active but factious resident Koreans into a more united and successful social movement, and (3) an established Burakumin movement into an international human rights organization. The fundamental similarity of rising activism for all three groups supports the world society thesis, but in-depth examination of concrete mechanisms unpacks complex global-local interplay and reveals intranational diversity in the impact of global human rights. Second, drawing on organizational institutionalism, I examine how local activism feeds back to global institutions. The empirical analysis details how local actors consolidate and expand global human rights.