international organizations

Intangible cultural heritage (ICH), made up of all immaterial manifestations of culture, represents the variety of living heritage of humanity as well as the most important vehicle of cultural diversity.

This indispensable work urging removal of the color barrier remains one of the key commentaries on the question of race in the modern era. First published in 1956, it arose from Richard Wright's participation in a global conference held in Bandung, Indonesia, in April 1955. With this report of what occurred at Bandung Wright takes a central spot on the international stage and serves as a harbinger of worldwide social and political change.

By reassessing the history of the civil rights movement and examining questions and areas of research that need to be addressed by future studies, New Directions in Civil Rights Studies challenges students of the civil rights movement to broaden their vision and, at the same time, to look more closely at the people, the communities, and the networks that provide the rich texture of the movement's history.

As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. wrote, "The United States was founded on the proclamation of 'unalienable' rights, and human rights ever since have had a peculiar resonance in the American tradition." But the American fondness for human rights rhetoric has presented two fundamental problems in foreign policy. As first a reluctant great power and then a more willing superpower, the United States has faced the traditional conflict between commitment to human values and exercise of power for other interests.

Between 1945 and 2005, nation-states around the world revised their criminal laws on sexual activities. This global reform wave—across countries and domains of sexual activity—followed from the reconstitution of world models of society around individuals rather than corporate bodies.

While globalization is largely theorized in terms of trans‐border flows, this article suggests an exploratory sociological framework for analyzing globalization as consisting of systemic processes of closure and containment. The suggested framework points at the emergence of a global mobility regime that actively seeks to contain social movement both within and across borders.

Europe faces the challenge of enormous recent asylum seeker inflows, and the allocation of these immigrants across European countries remains severely skewed, with some countries having a much larger per capita share of asylum applicants than others. Consequently, there is a debate at the EU level on how to allocate asylum seekers in order to tackle this imbalance. The present study focuses on preferences of European citizens towards the supranational policy issue of achieving a more equalized distribution of asylum seekers.

When do national movements adopt or reject international agendas? This question regarding the relationship between global and local thinking goes to the heart of the current globalization debates. This study examines the contrasting responses from the Chinese and Indian women's movements to the agenda adopted by the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women. The contrast challenges the dominant assumption that global thinking can substitute for local thinking.

The UNESCO Associated Schools Project emphasizes world community, human rights, and international understanding. This article investigates the emergence and global diffusion of the project from 1953 to 2001, estimating the influence of national, regional, and world characteristics on the likelihood of a country adopting a UNESCO school. It also addresses the effects of national linkages to the international human rights regime.

In the latter half of the 20th century, countries abolished the death penalty en masse. What factors help to explain this global trend? Conventional analyses explain abolition by focusing primarily on state level political processes. This article contributes to these studies by analyzing world cultural factors that lend to the abolition trend.