Virtual Library

The number of people living with HIV in the USA increased by 50% to 1.115 million persons from 1996 to 2006 and may exceed 1.5 million by 2015. The rising caseloads are straining the HIV care system, while recession and the unknown fate of health reforms are sources of uncertainty. HIV care in the USA evolved within a fragmented healthcare system. Unique community-based support and education linked to diverse multidisciplinary HIV care teams contributed to ‘AIDS exceptionalism’.

Why do so few live-in migrant domestic workers (MDWs) in Singapore utilize their weekly rest-day entitlement? Using data drawn from 3,886 online profiles of prospective MDWs and 40 interview sessions with MDWs, employers, and manpower agencies, we demonstrate how the industry encourages a “logic of submission” around rest-days. Through processual analysis, we unearth multiple, repeated moments of capitulation at key moments in a MDW’s work-life: (1) their interactions with a recruitment agency while still in their home country; (2) their matching with an overseas employer; (3) the duration of their two-year contract; and (4) the time of contract renewal. Submission to less frequent rest-days can secure their employability and financial mobility but also further individuates the MDW within the employer’s household and may lead to the engraining of a habitus of submissiveness towards their employers that can open the door to workers’ exploitation. We demonstrate how nationality and work experience further inflect this logic of submission to motivate non-Filipina and inexperienced MDWs to request even fewer rest-days than their counterparts. By combining feminist migration scholarship on Asian MDWs, with a sociology of law analysis, we offer up an example of how the same act of submission can simultaneously embody both resistance and victimhood depending upon the temporal and spatial scale used, and varying interpretations of the rest-day benefit as a much-needed respite, a monetizable benefit, or a signaling mechanism.

Recent decades are marked by an impressive expansion of actors and legal structures intended to globally extend a certain ‘Western’ catalog of human rights. Recently, too, legal scholars have developed concepts to justify normatively the expansion of human rights (e.g. Habermas, Walker, Koskenniemi). This article reviews recent legal literature on global constitutionalization of human rights to reveal its blind spots, at two levels: i) the reaffirmation of European precedency for establishing the sources of human rights and ii) a lack of sociological tools for describing interpenetrations between law, power and social inequalities. In order to empirically illustrate these objections, the article analyses the recent global expansion of human rights of minorities, using two examples: cases treated by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the Brazilian legalization of ancestral territories of afro-descendants. Finally, the article argues for a decentered perspective that (at the local level) connects human rights with concrete claims for justice.

Most studies of rape-law reform outcomes focus on single cases. We advance this literature by studying outcomes more systematically—leveraging new cross-national and longitudinal reform data—and showing that reform outcomes have both global and national determinants. Our exploratory analyses show three main findings: (1) Rape-law reforms are strongly associated with elevated police reporting between 1945 and 2005. (2) The strength of the association depends on domestic contexts. The association is stronger in countries characterized by individualism, women's mobilization, wealth, and education; it is weaker in countries with greater democracy and police strength. (3) The strength of the association also depends on global contexts. It is stronger in countries with dense linkages to world society and weaker under conditions of global institutionalization, as widespread diffusion gives rise to both ceremony without substance (i.e., domestic rape-law reforms without subsequent increases in reporting) and substance without ceremony (increased police reporting without antecedent reforms). In multivariate regression analyses, rape-law reforms, women's mobilization, and links to world society all have positive and significant effects on police reporting. It appears that both global and domestic contexts—together and independently—importantly shape policy and practice.

World polity theorists suggest that, over the last half century, policies on homosexuality have been liberalized throughout the world; other scholars argue that gay rights continue to face strong, possibly growing opposition. This article takes a different perspective. I argue that the global social space has grown increasingly articulated around homosexuality. Drawing on data from 174 countries between 1970 and 2015, I analyze the novel adoption of rationalized state policies regarding same-sex sexuality, evidenced by the rise of both supportive and repressive laws. Some of these approaches target homosexuality as a practice, while others target cultural questions that are relevant to gay people’s lives. How countries position themselves along these dimensions depends on specific national characteristics, including economic capital, geopolitical clout and connections, and racial and colonial legacies.

This study revisits the place of the Holocaust and the French revolutionary tradition in the birth of international human rights law, with particular reference to the genesis of the Universal Declaration and European Convention. It argues against conceptualizing the drafting of the Universal Declaration as an exceptional moment of Holocaust remembrance in the immediate aftermath of the war, positing instead that the framers' silence on the Jewish identity of the victims of Nazi genocidal acts functioned as an instrument of consensus politics. The article also examines how figures on the French far right practiced their own form of consensus politics by recasting their counterrevolutionary corporatist agenda in the idiom of human rights. 

A recurring theme in the sociology of human rights is the vast decoupling that exists between the formal codification of these rights in principle and their implementation in practice, fueling much debate about the effectiveness of international law. Yet, despite this disjuncture, a deeper question remains: given all the barriers that have impeded the realization of human rights, why have they become so widely institutionalized? Revisiting previous work in this journal, I argue that one important component of the expansion of human rights is the rise of the universal, egalitarian individual as the primary entity of social organization in world society. Additionally, I explore how the nature of human rights law itself promotes widespread decoupling that, in turn, fuels ongoing efforts to close the gap between principle and practice. Indeed, while human rights law envisions an ideal world that is practically unrealizable, it inspires a never-ending, global crusade to bring about that vision.

Women's political representation, once considered unacceptable by politicians and their publics, is now actively encouraged by powerful international actors. In this article, the authors ask how the growth and discourse of the international women's movement affected women's acquisition of political power over time. To answer this question, they use event history techniques to address women's political representation in more than 150 countries over 110 years (1893–2003). They consider multiple political outcomes: female suffrage, first female parliamentarian, and achievement of 10, 20, and 30 percent women in a country's national legislature. The findings show that increasing global pressure for the inclusion of women in international politics and the changing discourse of the international women's movement help to explain women's acquisition of these multiple political outcomes. Furthermore, by adding these concepts to traditional domestic models of women in politics, the authors demonstrate that country-level political, social structural, and cultural characteristics cause countries to act in conjunction with, or in opposition to, these global pressures. This is the first time that research on women in politics has considered such a comprehensive list of countries, time points, and outcomes.

Policies that expand the rights of marginalized groups provide an additional level of structural integration, but these changes do not always come with broad social acceptance or recognition. What happens when a legally marginalized group attains increased rights but not full political or social inclusion? In particular, what are the mental health implications of these transitions for impacted groups? We bring together theories of liminal legality and stress process to offer a framework for understanding how expansions in the legal rights of a highly politicized and vulnerable social group can be initially beneficial, but can attenuate due to renewed or new stress events, chronic stressors, and anticipatory stressors. We use the case of Latina/o immigrant youth who transitioned from undocumented legal status to temporarily protected status under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Analyses of representative California statewide survey data from 2007 to 2018, combined with surveys and in-depth interviews with DACA recipients, suggest that without full social and structural inclusion, legal transitions that expand rights will produce short-term psychological benefits that do not hold up over time.

In the aftermath of the First World War, a so-called 'minority problem' loomed large in European politics. This problem was understood, moreover, to be peculiar to central and eastern Europe. In fact, however, linguistic diversity was not a unique feature of the east, but also an ongoing challenge in states that had long claimed to have a unified national culture. This article compares policies of national classification and minority rights in France and Czechoslovakia after the First World War. It suggests that even as east/west binaries structured the unequal application of new international minority rights protections, France, rather than Czechoslovakia, implemented a more radical and racist policy of forcible national classification.