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Citizenship rights came into being because relatively organized members of the general population bargained with state authorities for several centuries, bargained first over the means of war, then over enforceable claims that would serve their interests outside of war. During the French Revolution, from the Declaration of the Rights of Man onward, bargaining that established citizenship rights took place right out in the open. In caricature, the argument says that rights of citizenship formed as bargains struck in the course of both sorts of struggle, first chiefly in defense against invasive state demands for the means of war, later in pursuit of much wider range of collective action and state intervention. Citizenship rights belong in principle to everyone who qualifies as full-fledged member of given state; membership in category suffices to qualify a person for enforceable claims. Citizens of European states now enjoy ipso facto rights to education, housing, health care, income, and a wide variety of political participation.

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.

Genealogies of Citizenship is a remarkable rethinking of human rights and social justice. As global governance is increasingly driven by market fundamentalism, growing numbers of citizens have become socially excluded and internally stateless. Against this movement to organize society exclusively by market principles, Margaret Somers argues that socially inclusive democratic rights must be counter-balanced by the powers of a social state, a robust public sphere and a relationally-sturdy civil society. Through epistemologies of history and naturalism, contested narratives of social capital, and Hurricane Katrina's racial apartheid, she warns that the growing authority of the market is distorting the non-contractualism of citizenship; rights, inclusion and moral worth are increasingly dependent on contractual market value. In this pathbreaking work, Somers advances an innovative view of rights as public goods rooted in an alliance of public power, political membership, and social practices of equal moral recognition - the right to have rights.

Rights in Rebellion examines the global discourse of human rights and its influence on the local culture, identity, and forms of resistance. Through a multi-sited ethnography of various groups in the indigenous communities of Chiapas, Mexico—from paramilitaries to a Zapatista community, an indigenous human rights organization, and the Zapatista Good Governance Councils—the book explores how different groups actively engage with the discourse of rights, adapting it to their own individual subjectivities and goals, and develop new forms of resistance to the neoliberal model and its particular configurations of power.

Far from being a traditional community study, this book instead follows the discourse of human rights and indigenous rights through their various manifestations. The author offers a compelling argument for the importance of a critical engagement between the anthropologist and her "subjects," passionately making the case for activist research and demonstrating how such an engagement will fortify and enliven academic research.

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.

It:

• considers some varied cases of public intervention, including welfare, caring, mental health provisions, pensions, justice and free speech alongside the rights issues they raise
• examines the question of rights from the point of view of distinctive population groups, such as prisoners and victims, women, ethnic minorities, indigenous peoples and lesbians and gays. 

A key strength is its detailed presentation and analysis of different aspects of rights and its exploration of a variety of analytical perspectives. Rights are viewed, not in terms of ethical certainty, but as the product of social processes and part of shifting terrain which is open to negotiation.

Including a theoretical critique of existing perspectives, Rights offers a diverse and detailed exploration of the contribution sociological thought can make to this increasingly important aspect of social life and is an invaluable aid to students studying in this area.

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.

Long the arena of philosophers, legal scholars, and political scientists, the interdisciplinary study of human rights has recently seen an influx of sociologists. Why is this so, and how do sociologists contribute to our understanding of human rights in the contemporary world?

In this landmark new text, Mark Frezzo explores the sociological perspective on human rights, which he shows to be uniquely placed to illuminate the economic, political, social, and cultural conditions under which human rights norms and laws are devised, interpreted, implemented, and enforced. Sociologists treat human rights not as immutable attributes but as highly contested claims that vary across historical time and geographic space, and investigate how human rights can serve either to empower or to constrain social actors, from large societies to small communities and identity groups. Frezzo guides readers through the scholarly, pedagogical, and practical applications of a sociological view of major debates such as foundationalism vs. social constructionism, universalism vs. particularism, globalism vs. localism, and collective vs. individual rights.

This cutting-edge text will appeal to students of sociology, political science, law, development, and social movements, and all interested in the nature, scope, and applicability of human rights in the twenty-first century.