Sociology

This article defends the claim that human rights is a legitimate subject of inquiry for sociologists, and proceeds to present the case for a particular application of sociological theory to the understanding of gross human rights violations. Sociology, it claims, is equipped to study the dynamics of social institutions – socially constructed language-structures within which social action is framed – and since the mid-20th century, human rights has become such an institution.

This study asks one crucial question: How do Lebanese women apply available social capital and informal social networks to engage in political activism for women’s rights? Building on social- and women’s-movement theories, I argue that Lebanese feminists do not exclusively operate in the public sphere in their fight for political goals, nor do they privilege only the extra-family space. On the contrary, they engage in political activities by using extended family networks as a form of weak social ties.

This article responds to dual calls for researching and theorising everyday social phenomena in postcolonial studies on the one hand, and serious engagement with the postcolonial within the discipline of sociology on the other. It focuses on the everyday lives of asylum seekers living on asylum seeker welfare support in the UK. Asylum seekers offer a good case study for exploring the postcolonial everyday because they live in poverty and consequently experience daily harms at the hands of the state, despite the UK fulfilling its obligations to them under human rights law.

The theory of cultural trauma focuses on the relationship between shared suffering and collective identity: Events become traumatic when they threaten a group’s foundational self-understanding. As it stands, the theory has illuminated profound parallels in societal suffering across space and time. Yet focusing on identity alone cannot explain the considerable differences that scholars document in the outcomes of the trauma process.

This article examines the effects of an uncertain legal status on the lives of immigrants, situating their experiences within frameworks of citizenship/belonging and segmented assimilation, and using Victor Turner's concept of liminality and Susan Coutin's "legal nonexistence." It questions black-and-white conceptualizations of documented and undocumented immigration by exposing the gray area of "liminal legality" and examines how this in-between status affects the individual's social networks and family, the place of the church in immigrants' lives, and the broader domain of artistic expre

Much of what is known about how the law operates is based on the criminal justice process. What is less understood is whether legal, extra-legal, and organizational attributes matter for non-criminal justice processes, such as discrimination and employment disputes. It is this general issue that we examine in this paper. We also incorporate how the development of the legal construct of sexual harassment affects case settlement. Our study attempts to overcome the underutilization of theoretical understandings from the sociology of law to study sexual harassment complaints.

In their article, Judith Blau and Alberto Moneada deliver a provocative argument about how we should imagine and institutionally act upon human rights violations. Inspired by the internationally quickening pace of legal authority in prosecuting violations of humanitarian law, Blau and Moneada build an argument that there is little reason to distinguish between violations of human rights and of humanitarian law. Their article suggests profound ways in which a sociological lens might transform current debate.

Are recent trends in international law supporting child rights and promoting neoliberal economic reforms complementary or contradictory? To answer this question, we identify the component parts of child rights mobilization, recent global economic reforms, and child rights outcomes to theorize the particular relationships among them.

This study explores, with quantitative data analyses, why nation-states with very negative human rights records tend to sign and ratify human rights treaties at rates similar to those of states with positive records.

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.