Virtual Library

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. Second, human rights language is driven by the extent of the international human rights regime at the time of a constitution’s writing. Third, human rights language tends to appear in newer constitutions and in the constitutions of emergent and reorganized states. National constitutions are imprinted with global social conditions, which now stress the discourse of human rights.

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. Building on research in the new institutionalism, we find that asymmetric relationships between states make it less likely for human rights recommendations to be accepted, with accepted recommendations tending to be more general and easier to implement. We argue that these partnership patterns provide evidence for normative corridors that give world society its shape. By drawing together world society approaches with relational sociology, we develop new insights into the structuration of human rights and normative change more broadly.

This pioneering book demonstrates how different traditions of sociological thought can contribute to an understanding of the theory and practice of rights. It provides a sociological treatment of a wide range of substantive issues but never loses sight of the key theoretical questions.

How does culture make a difference to the realisation of human rights in Western states? It is only through cultural politics that human rights may become more than abstract moral ideals, protecting human beings from state violence and advancing protection from starvation and the social destruction of poverty. Using an innovative methodology, this book maps the emergent 'intermestic' human rights field within the US and UK in order to investigate detailed case studies of the cultural politics of human rights. Kate Nash researches how the authority to define human rights is being created within states as a result of international human rights commitments. Through comparative case studies, she explores how cultural politics is affecting state transformation today.