international organizations

What factors determine whether and how deeply countries will commit to the international human rights regime? Using data for up to 142 countries between 1966 and 2000, this article analyzes patterns of membership to the International Human Rights Covenants. The analysis produced two main conclusions. First, the potential costs associated with joining a treaty, rather than its substantive content, motivates the decision to join.

The European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR) is often considered the “jewel in the crown” of the European Union's democracy promotion. Its mandate encompasses the funding of democratizing civil society organizations and thus the facilitation of democratization “from below.” It is argued here that if we apply Foucauldian governmentality tools to the analysis of the workings of the EIDHR, we can see that, despite the pluralistic rhetoric that guides it, the Instrument's objectives and management structures facilitate particular kinds of democratic visions.

This article delineates trajectories of the glocalization of law and maps the changing contours of legal pluralism using empirical material on World Bank financed infrastructure and biodiversity projects in India.

Evidence of protest expansion both in the United States and abroad has stimulated theoretical discussion of a “movement society,” with some arguing that protest activities are becoming a standard feature of democratic politics. In advancing this claim, many have highlighted the role of domestic factors—for example, generational change or economic affluence—without fully accounting for the possibility that international dynamics may play an important role as well.

The authors integrate social movement outcomes research and the world society approach to build a theoretical model to examine the impact of global and local factors on movement outcomes.

This research seeks to understand the factors that lead nation‐states to ratify international human rights treaties in the contemporary world, despite their potential cost for state sovereignty. We argue that normative pressure from international society, along with historical contingencies during the Cold War, encouraged many states to ratify these treaties. We present an event‐history analysis of ratification of seven key international human rights treaties in 164 countries in the period between 1965 and 2001.

Although family and migration scholars recognize that intimate partner violence (IPV) can motivate women’s movement between countries, little research considers IPV or other gendered family violence further back in women migrants’ life histories or explores the legacy of gendered family violence in cases where such violence is not the primary push factor.

The history of the genesis and institutionalization of the European Convention on Human Rights offers a striking account of the innovation of a new legal subject and practice—European human rights—that went along with, but also beyond, the political and legal genesis of Europe following World War II.

National human rights institutions, defined as domestic but globally legitimated agencies charged with promoting and protecting human rights, have emerged worldwide. This article examines the effect of these organizations on two kinds of human rights outcomes: physical integrity rights and civil and political rights. We analyze cross-national longitudinal data using regression models that account for the endogeneity of organizational formation.

A growing body of research has revealed a rapid expansion in transnational organizing and activism, but we know relatively little about the qualitative changes these transnational ties represent. Using surveys of transnational social movement organizations (TSMOs) and additional case study material, this paper examines the extent to which these organizations have been able to articulate strategic frames that motivate global level organizing and collective action. The analysis also investigates how inequities between the global North and South affect TSMO solidarity.