"Human Rights and Sociology: Some Observations from Africa."
In this paper, I examine the relationship between sociology and the human rights discourse. A major segment of the discourse is between Western and nonwestern scholars joining the debate from a wide variety of disciplines including law, political science, economics, and demography. Sociology has made a poor showing. Perhaps this is due to the more general problem that the discipline, as a whole, lags behind others in applying itself to the human rights debate. Sjoberg and Vaughan argue that sociological theory has hardly been brought to bear on human rights issues.