Sociology

The social movement for African-American civil rights is one of most studied and celebrated social phenomena of the twentieth century. One factor in explaining the movement's successes, however, is usually given little if any explicit attention by civil rights scholars, and has not been explained adequately. This is the impact of the Cold on domestic United States race politics, and the process through the Cold War lessened resistance to civil rights movement demands.

This article analyses the creation of new human rights by a contemporary transnational agrarian movement, Vía Campesina. It makes the case that the movement’s assertion of new rights contributes to shaping a cosmopolitan, multicultural, and anti-hegemonic conception of human rights. It discusses the advantages and constraints of the human rights framework and analyses the creation of new rights by the movement as a way to overcome the limitations of the ‘rights master frame’. It concludes with a discussion of some of the challenges involved in the institutionalization of new rights.

Existing research has focused on the extent to which transnational interventions compel recalcitrant governments to reduce levels of domestic repression, but few have considered how such interventions might also provoke new forms of repression. Using a longitudinal study of repression against AIDS activism in China between 1989 and 2013, the author proposes that transnational institutions’ provision of material resources and reshaping of organizational rules can transform a domestic repressive apparatus in specific policy areas.

Sociologists empirically and theoretically neglect genocide. In this article, our critical collective framing perspective begins by focusing on state origins of race-based ideology in the mobilization and dehumanization leading to genocide. We elaborate this transformative dynamic by identifying racially driven macro-micro-macro-level processes that are theoretically underdeveloped and contested in many settings. We investigate generic processes by exploiting an unprecedented survey of refugees from the ongoing genocide in Darfur.

Norbert Elias suggested that ‘civilization’ involves the transformation of human habitus so that violence of all sorts is gradually subjected to greater and more sophisticated forms of management and control, whereas ‘decivilization’ encompasses processes which produce an increase in violence and a breakdown in the stability and consistency of on‐going social relations. What remains unexplored is the extent to which ‘civilizing offensives’, the self‐conscious attempts to bring about ‘civilization’, have revolved around essentially violent policies and practices.

This study examines the major factors that predict states’ repressive policies, focusing on the relationship between oppositional terror attacks and state repression of core human rights. We rely on a theoretical framework that brings together actor-oriented explanations and socio-cultural approaches. While the former emphasize purposive rational action, international pressures, and domestic threats, the latter focus on the power of ideas and on processes of policy diffusion and cultural norms.

The terms terror, terrorism, and terrorist do not identify causally coherent and distinct social phenomena but strategies that recur across a wide variety of actors and political situations. Social scientists who reify the terms confuse themselves and render a disservice to public discussion. The U.S. government's own catalogs of terrorist events actually support both claims.

Human rights discourse is central for the work of international social movements. Viewing human rights as a context-dependent and socially constructed discourse, this article investigates how it is used by a specific social movement – Israel-critical diaspora Jewish activists – and argues that it can simultaneously challenge and reproduce existing practices of domination.

In this article, I build a new line of health inequality research that parallels the emerging structural racism literature. I develop theory and measurement for the concept of structural sexism and examine its relationship to health outcomes. Consistent with contemporary theories of gender as a multilevel social system, I conceptualize and measure structural sexism as systematic gender inequality at the macro level (U.S. state), meso level (marital dyad), and micro level (individual). I use U.S.

Neutrality has been the classic answer of the liberal state to religious and cultural difference. A number of multicultural critics recently debunked it as “myth” and group power in disguise. Comparing Islamic headscarf laws in France and Germany, I argue that neutrality is more complex and multifaceted than this. The comparison shows that neutrality leaves space for particularistic and universalistic, unity- and rights-oriented stances, the first located in the sphere of democratic politics, the second in the legal–constitutional sphere.