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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. In advancing our perspective, special attention is given to the place of organizations in human rights theorizing; at the same time, we delineate some of the highly contested aspects of the endeavor to institutionalize a set of human rights principles.

Evidence for Hope makes the case that, yes, human rights work. Critics may counter that the movement is in serious jeopardy or even a questionable byproduct of Western imperialism. They point out that Guantánamo is still open, the Arab Spring protests have been crushed, and governments are cracking down on NGOs everywhere. But respected human rights expert Kathryn Sikkink draws on decades of research and fieldwork to provide a rigorous rebuttal to pessimistic doubts about human rights laws and institutions. She demonstrates that change comes slowly and as the result of struggle, but in the long term, human rights movements have been vastly effective. Attacks on the human rights movement’s credibility are based on the faulty premise that human rights ideas emerged in North America and Europe and were imposed on developing southern nations. Starting in the 1940s, Latin American leaders and activists were actually early advocates for the international protection of human rights. Sikkink shows that activists and scholars disagree about the efficacy of human rights because they use different yardsticks to measure progress. Comparing the present to the past, she shows that genocide and violence against civilians have declined over time, while access to healthcare and education has increased dramatically. Cognitive and news biases contribute to pervasive cynicism, but Sikkink’s investigation into past and current trends indicates that human rights is not in its twilight. Instead, this is a period of vibrant activism that has made impressive improvements in human well-being. Exploring the strategies that have led to real humanitarian gains since the middle of the twentieth century, Evidence for Hope looks at how these essential advances can be supported and sustained for decades to come.

The closing months of his presidency, Bill Clinton and some of his entourage have taken to using the buzzphrase "human and political rights" to replace the simpler "human rights. Despite attempts to base the rights on "nature", in most cases they—by their very design—either run counter to nature or, at best, concern things about which nature is strictly neutral. There is nothing wrong with defining rights in terms of high human aspirations, but they will then require a very different justification from rights based on human needs. They involve, in effect, a purely teleological justification: human rights become the rights we need in order to achieve a certain desired end state of society, not rights derived from the elusive state of true humanness. One of the major paradoxes surrounding the human rights issue is that it became central to foreign policy as part of a deliberate strategy to protect the national interest.

This article argues that the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann prepares the ground for a genuinely sociological theory of human rights. Through a presentation of Luhmann’s work on human rights, it describes the historical and sociological processes that make visible why human rights emerge as a central feature of modern society. It is argued that the emergence of fundamental freedoms and human rights can be related to the dominant structure of modern society, that is, functional differentiation. Human rights are considered as a social institution, whereby modern society protects its own structure against self-destructive tendencies. By giving inalienable and equal rights to all human beings, society ensures that the differentiation between different functional subsystems is maintained and at the same time institutionalizes specific mechanisms to increase stability and protection of the individual. The article first examines some features of the systems-theoretical framework that are used to describe and analyse the issue of human rights. Next, it presents a brief overview of the semantic evolution of human rights. This reconstruction focuses on the question how the modern semantics of human rights can be linked to a specific structural societal transformation. The second part of the essay is devoted to the social function of human rights. After focusing on the general function, it makes a distinction between ‘fundamental freedoms’ on the one hand, and the ‘rights of equality’ on the other.

The author argues the concept of human rights is a development of the older notion of natural rights and that the modern understanding of natural rights evolved in the context of the European struggle to legitimate its overseas empires. The French Revolution changed this by, in effect, linking human rights to the idea of citizenship. Human rights were thus tied not only to a specific ethical-legal code but also implicitly to a particular kind of political system, both of inescapably European origin. In both cases, however, being employed was an underlying idea of universality whose origins are to be found in the Greek and Roman idea of a common law for all humanity. He ends by arguing that to defend human rights against its non-Western critics, one must be aware of the genealogy of the concept and then be prepared to endorse an essentially Western European understanding of the human.

In current political debates, the term “cosmopolitanism” is often used in quite vague ways, as part of sweeping generalizations that might not hold up to closer scrutiny. Imperfect Cosmopolis aims to clarify the meaning of the term by approaching it from a decidedly historical perspective—distinguishing, for example, between types of cosmopolitanism and the development of the concept through the centuries.

I examine the current movement for children's rights in the United States in terms of the history of child saving, and of the recent events concerning human rights. I stress the conflicts between the salvation and liberation of children, especially in the areas of education and justice. I also consider various approaches to children's rights to define the current movement, and review recent concerns so that I may clarify future needs and strategies.

This paper explores various aspects of the problem of perspectivism in Max Weber’s sociology as a component of the legacy of Friedrich Nietzsche in order to examine the contribution, if any, of sociological thinking to the understanding of human rights. In this inquiry I am more concerned with the theoretical contribution to the analysis of relativism in relation to rights rather than with the sociological analysis of which empirical conditions do or do not promote political respect for the exercise of human rights.

Since when, how, and why have sociologists discussed human rights in their work? In which forms of theoretical and empirical inquiry have such investigations been conducted, and what are some of their consequences for the praxis of sociology as well as for our understanding of human rights? We focus on the manner in which sociologists have conceptualized human rights and approached the topic from a number of analytical perspectives. In general, human rights have only recently begun to move sociologists in any noteworthy degree. This paper traces the difficult birth of a sociology of human rights relative to the place of the notion of rights in the sociology of law. This paper also ponders on the enthusiastic turn towards human rights in more recent times and criticizes some the reasons for this generous embrace of human rights. This critique is intended to enable rather than impede a truly sociological sociology of (human) rights.

Contrary to current tendencies, the founders of sociology as a discipline regarded the sociology of law as an integral part of social theory. Law and its historical variations were treated by them as a constitutive component of social life. This can be demonstrated especially with regard to Émile Durkheim and Max Weber. It also provides an opportunity to highlight the differences between these authors, not only in methodological but also in substantive terms. In the essay it is shown how both authors treated law in comparative and developmental perspectives and varied in assessing the role of penal law and human rights in the course of history. Connections to the current theoretical debate in Germany are also drawn.