Europe

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.

Liberal and marxist theories of civil society contain a conceptual paradox of `civil society without citizenship'. This article shows how the paradox about civil society comes about through an under-theorization of the multivalent character of citizenship and rights, which in turn reflects a rather impoverished understanding of culture, discourse and symbolization.

This article explores the effects of the legalization of international human rights on citizens and non-citizens within states. Adopting a sociological approach to rights it becomes clear that, even in Europe, the cosmopolitanization of law is not necessarily resulting in greater equality and justice. In fact, ‘actually existing’ cosmopolitan citizenship is characterized by a proliferation of status groups that concretize new forms of inequality, including those of super-citizens, marginal citizens, quasi-citizens, sub-citizens and un-citizens.

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.