rights movements

The international diffusion of similar laws and policies across nations is now a well-covered theme in sociology, but no one has yet asked what these similar laws and policies mean. We take the case of anti-female-genital-cutting policies in Egypt, Tanzania, and the U.S. and turn our attention to how local political situations interacted with international discourse. Functional relevance and international standing combined to affect levels of contestation.

Citizenship rights are the result of specific political bargains between different collective actors and state authorities (Tilly Theory and Society 26(34):599–602, 1997). The political bargains for rights are encoded in institutions, and these institutions develop independently from each other and take organizational characteristics that make certain rights easier to adopt than others.

Under what conditions will individuals risk their lives to resist repressive states? This question is addressed through comparative analysis of the emergence of human rights organizations under military dictatorships in Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina. While severe state repression is expected to lead to generalized demobilization, these cases reveal that repression may directly stimulate collective action.

The notion of intimate partner violence (IPV) as gender-based has been widely questioned by advocates of antifeminist men’s rights movements, who have claimed that societal disregard for men’s victimization in intimate relations is a central component of discrimination against men in contemporary societies. Similar views have been expressed by researchers as part of a gender-neutral discourse articulated in opposition to feminist, or gender-sensitive, understandings of IPV.

This paper examines public opinion and media coverage surrounding four important events which affected the development of homosexual rights in Maine in the 1970s: the birth of a homosexual student group on a University of Maine campus and the conference it organized; the adoption of a gay rights plank in the election platform of the state's Democratic Party; revisions to the state's criminal code which decriminalized homosexual activities; and a second conference organized by the student group. Only the first event aroused major public outcry.

The so-called ‘gay age of consent’ was the most high-profile issue in UK lesbian, gay and bisexual politics during the 1990s. Campaigning for an equal age of consent provoked a series of extended public and parliamentary debates, concluding with the passage of the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act (2000).This article analyses these debates to reveal emerging social relationships between heterosexuality and homosexuality.

The article contends that the attitudes of the majority population towards the allocation of political rights to out-group populations are distinct from attitudes towards the allocation of social rights. Data obtained from an attitudinal survey administered to a representative sample of Israeli adults show that the level of objection to the allocation of rights to labour migrants in the political sphere is twice as high as that found in the social sphere.

This article argues that democratic deepening is shaped by shifting civil society-state relations that can only be understood by disaggregating democratic deepening into its component parts of participation, representation, and stateness. This frame is used to explore the divergent democratic trajectories of Brazil, India, and South Africa. Through the examples of local government transformation and social movement mobilization, I argue that a “project” civil society in Brazil has deepened democracy and transformed the state.

There is a rich collection of case studies examining the relationship between democratization, women's movements, and gendered state outcomes, but the variation across cases is still poorly understood. In response, this article develops a theoreticallygrounded comparative framework to evaluate and explain cross-national variations in the gendered outcomes of democratic transitions.

This paper argues that periodic waves of crowding‐in to ‘hot’ issue fields are a recurring feature of how globally networked civil society organizations operate, especially in countries of the Global South. We elaborate on this argument through a study of Indian civil society mobilization around climate change.