Europe

The article examines the limitations of methodological nationalism in the studies of social memory through a case study of memory of Stalinist repression in Belarus. It analyses how various social agencies – national and local activists, religious organisations, and international foundations – use the memory of repression for constructing post‐Soviet Belarusian identity by embedding their national representations in larger transnational frameworks.

Controversy sets abortion apart from other issues studied by world society theorists, who consider the tendency for policies institutionalized at the global level to diffuse across very different countries. The authors conduct an event history analysis of the spread (however limited) of abortion liberalization policies from 1960 to 2009.

This paper has two main objectives. One is to consider the central place of human rights in today's global order and the other is to articulate a theoretical framework that will make sociological sense out of current human rights discourse and practice. Human rights emerged from, but need to be distinguished from, societal rights, and they are to be viewed as social claims upon social power arrangements.

A public sociology that will tackle the public issues of today requires the transformation of sociology as we know it. This is the stirring message of this volume—at the heart of sociology must lie a concern for society as such, the protection of those social relations through which we recognize each other as humans. Thus, the chapters focus on those fundamental human rights that uphold human community, first and foremost, against the colonizing projects of states and markets.

During the twentieth century, 80 percent of all famine victims worldwide died in China and the Soviet Union. In this rigorous and thoughtful study, Felix Wemheuer analyzes the historical and political roots of these socialist-era famines, in which overambitious industrial programs endorsed by Stalin and Mao Zedong created greater disasters than those suffered under prerevolutionary regimes.

Human rights norms do matter. Those established by the Helsinki Final Act contributed directly to the demise of communism in the former East bloc, contends Daniel Thomas. This book counters those skeptics who doubt that such international norms substantially affect domestic political change, while explaining why, when, and how they matter most. Thomas argues that the Final Act, signed in 1975, transformed the agenda of East-West relations and provided a common platform around which opposition forces could mobilize.

The Arab Uprisings of 2011 can be seen as a turning point for media and information studies scholars, many of whom newly discovered the region as a site for theories of digital media and social transformation. This work has argued that digital media technologies fuel or transform political change through new networked publics, new forms of connective action cultivating liberal democratic values. These works have, surprisingly, little to say about the United States and other Western colonial powers’ legacy of occupation, ongoing violence and strategic interests in the region.