Sociology

This article explores the relationship between social movements, human rights and law at different scales. I compare ‘global constitutionalism’ and ‘subaltern cosmopolitanism’ as approaches to movements, rights and law. As sociologists, we are especially well placed to address certain assumptions on which these inter-disciplinary approaches rely. I argue that assumptions about the relationship between social movements and human rights that are fundamentally normative limit our understanding of the diversity of organisational forms through which human rights are being defined, and of the complexity of multi-scalar law through which claims to justice are being made. In particular, the importance of the state and national law for institutionalising human rights norms should not be neglected by privileging either local or international law as the legitimate focus of democratic claims for justice.

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 article defends the claim that human rights is a legitimate subject of inquiry for sociologists, and proceeds to present the case for a particular application of sociological theory to the understanding of gross human rights violations. Sociology, it claims, is equipped to study the dynamics of social institutions – socially constructed language-structures within which social action is framed – and since the mid-20th century, human rights has become such an institution. The article advocates an intellectual project for the sociology of rights, drawing on a diverse range of sources, that recognises how human rights abuses are made possible when the very concept of the ‘human’ is subtly redefined through these language-structures.

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.

This article contributes to an understanding of the role of agency in a sociology of human rights by examining how a small group of individuals interpreted, defined, and instantiated ‘hard’ human rights, or those atrocities associated with war crimes and crimes against humanity. Using political theorist Judith Shklar’s perpetrator-focused framework of ‘putting the prevention of cruelty first’, we explore the role of agency in the construction of human rights through the empirical lens of US war crimes policies around the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords for Bosnia-Herzegovina. We draw on US State Department documents, and on interviews with key participants in the Accords, to argue that a richer sociology of human rights – seen as socially situated and embedded – requires a fuller appreciation of the experiences of key social actors in those social locations in which human rights are articulated, interpreted, and actualized.

This article argues that the forms through which violence and atrocity are expressed – legal, statistical and testimonial – are important objects of analysis because credo is manifest in form, and an examination of form reveals something about the relationship between the ‘world view’ of human rights organizations and the ‘styles of thought’ that shape and inform their representations. The article considers what the discursive forms that seem indigenous to human rights and human rights advocacy both express (legalism, scientism) and repress (historicism), and discusses ways in which these forms of representation potentially facilitate and inhibit action.

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).

There are few attempts to link human rights discourses and child poverty debates, though the field is expanding. Within sociology, both the study of rights and of childhood are marginal. This article utilises a sociological approach to bridge rights and poverty debates in relation to children and explore why there are barriers to implementing children’s rights in specific instances. Drawing on Young Lives research, a longitudinal study of children growing up in poverty, the article explores how discourses of children’s rights play out in local contexts and how a narrowly legal perspective fails to engage with children’s experiences of poverty. The article concludes by proposing that a broader, sociological approach to rights as not only rules, but also as structures, relationships and processes (Galant and Parlevliet, 2005) can better engage with the causes and consequences of poverty, while also developing locally relevant responses.

This interdisciplinary article argues that human rights must be understood in terms of opportunities for social participation and that social and economic rights are integral to any discussion of the subject. We offer both a social constructionist and a normative framework for a sociology of human rights which reaches beyond liberal individualism, combining insights from the work of Amartya Sen and from French convention theory. Following Sen, we argue that human rights are founded on the promotion of human capabilities as ethical demands shaped by public reasoning. Using French convention theory, we show how the terms of such deliberation are shaped by different constructions of collectively held values and the compromises reached between them. We conclude by demonstrating how our approach offers a new perspective on spheres of public action and the role these should play in promoting social cohesion, individual capabilities and human rights.

A sophisticated understanding of human rights must look at ways in which conflicts between competing rights are negotiated. This article undertakes a case study of the interrelationship of rights related to religion and sexuality in societies, in the context of inequality between heterosexual and homosexual persons. It analyses recent Church of England guidance on appointing bishops in relation to the Equality Act 2010 and its religious exemptions to non-discrimination provisions. I investigate whether formal Church teaching and the guidance owe more to heteronormativity than the purely scriptural mandate that is claimed. I argue that the Equality Act’s preference for religion rights over sexuality rights in the discrimination exemptions for organised religions, and the Act’s understanding of what counts as a religious conviction, are better understood as a de-prioritisation of sexuality rights that reflects the prevailing structural inequalities of heteronormative secular and religious social worlds.

Drawing on Durkheim, Simmel, and Luhmann, this article grounds the polysemic character of privacy and its contingent legal determination in the functional differentiation of social communication systems. It demonstrates a previously overlooked common denominator among privacy conflicts and an emergent principle for their legal resolution. Case-law examples from the US Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights show how functional relevance turns ‘private’ events into ‘public’ ones, or ‘reasonable limitations’ of privacy into ‘unwarranted violations’, and vice versa.

What happens to human rights discourse in Asia will be of critical importance to the future of the whole human rights project. There are at least three possible scenarios: acceptance, rejection and transformation. Majority western opinion hopes for the first but expects the second. This article argues for the third, transformation. Central to the argument is the construction of an ideal type – enforceable benevolence – of a distinctively Asian human rights regime. Although this ideal type has been constructed on the basis of a consideration of Asian thought and practice, it has yet to be fully realized anywhere. In the meantime it represents a sociologically appropriate standard against which to judge the progress or not of Asian societies towards the realization of what I argue is their own vision of human dignity.