Middle East/North Africa

A key challenge to understanding the eruption of globalization protest since the late 1990s is the lack of data on the protesters themselves. Although scholars have focused increasingly on these large protest events and the transnational social movements that play a role organizing them, information about the protesters remains scant. We address this research gap by analyzing survey data collected from a random sample of protesters at five globalization protests in three countries.

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.

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.

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.

“COIN,” the counter-terrorism doctrine the United States used during the Iraq War, was in criminological terms overly reliant on militarized “incapacitationist” strategies. Based a on competing “societal reactions” or community-level labeling theory, we argue that COIN failed to anticipate but predictably produced state-based “legal cynicism” in Arab Sunni communities—increasing rather than decreasing politically defiant terrorist crimes.

World culture in the post-war era of rapid globalization is increasingly organized, rationalized, and ubiquitous. The core of world culture - rationalized science, technology, organization, professionalization, etc. - has been thoroughly institutionalized. For all kinds of actors, global principles and procedures for the production of identity, action, and progress have expanded. Ontologically, individualism has been rising rapidly while collective identities have also strengthened in some respects.

Drawing on Austin’s speech act theory and on related theories of performativity and positioning, this article analyses the public confessions during the 1990s by three prominent state actors in Turkey about their direct involvement in state crimes against Kurds and left-wing political opponents. All three cases received significant media attention at the time. The aim of the article is not only to shed new light on those specific confessions by the perpetrators within the Turkish context, but also to develop further theoretical insights into the phenomenon of public confessions as such.

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.

This article extends critical trends of citizenship studies and the theory of accumulation by dispossession to articulate how settler colonial citizenship is instantiated through the active accrual of land and resources and how the emerging settler colonial citizenship entrenches both structural subjugation and resistance. The article then examines the reformation of the boundaries of citizenship through indigenous agency.

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.