Latin America/Caribbean

The mass violence of the twentieth century’s two world wars—followed more recently by decentralized and privatized warfare, manifested in terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and other localized forms of killing—has led to a heightened awareness of human beings’ vulnerability and the precarious nature of the institutions they create to protect themselves from violence and exploitation. This vulnerability, something humans share amid the diversity of cultural beliefs and values that mark their differences, provides solid ground on which to construct a framework of human rights. 

Torture is indisputably abhorrent. Why, you might ask, would you even want to think or read about torture? That is a very good question, and one this book addresses in a compelling and enlightening way. Torture is a very important issue, not least because millions of people around the world have been subjected to this odious practice—and many are enduring torture right now as you read these words.

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.

Considerable sociological work shows that the human rights regime is rapidly expanding through isomorphic processes. We provide new insight into human rights diffusion through an analysis of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR), a global forum in which all states receive human rights recommendations from their peers. We convert the roughly 50,000 recommendations from the first two cycles of the UPR into a relational dataset of states making and receiving recommendations, inductively modeling this process of human rights diffusion through latent class regression.

A recent movement has extended previous emphases on the rights of national citizens by asserting the global human rights of all persons. This article describes the extent to which this change is reflected in the language of national constitutions around the world. Human rights language – formerly absent from almost all constitutions – now appears in most of them. Rather than characterizing developed or democratic states, human rights language is, first, especially common in countries most susceptible to global influences.

While transitions to democracy have been hailed as the most important phenomena of this century, few scholars understand the role that women have played in these metamorphoses. This article uses an historical in-depth case study to examine how and why women mobilized against the state in Chile. Previous social movement theories have not attended adequately to cultural and ideational elements (e.g., gender ideology), much less these factors in the Third World and authoritarian context.

Although interest in the consolidation and expansion of the international human rights regime has grown in recent years, little attention is accorded to the formal procedures that allow individuals aggrieved by states to appeal directly to an international audience. Using data for 82 countries between 1976 and 1999, this article examines the political and cultural factors that produce cross-national variation in the propensity of individuals to file allegations of human rights abuse with the Human Rights Committee.

Across Latin America, the 1990s saw an increase in popular lynchings of suspected criminals at the hands of large crowds. Although it is often assumed that these incidents involve random, regrettable, and relatively spontaneous acts of violence or throwbacks to the past, I argue in this article that these represent purposeful, powerful, and deeply political acts.