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Evidence of protest expansion both in the United States and abroad has stimulated theoretical discussion of a “movement society,” with some arguing that protest activities are becoming a standard feature of democratic politics. In advancing this claim, many have highlighted the role of domestic factors—for example, generational change or economic affluence—without fully accounting for the possibility that international dynamics may play an important role as well. The lack of work is surprising not only because the trend in protest is international in scope, but also because work in comparative sociology suggests globalization may make an important contribution. This study addresses the empirical gap by examining how political globalization (as measured by memberships in international organizations) and economic globalization (as measured by trade activity and foreign investment) influence trends in protest participation. Using data from World Values Surveys of 37,716 respondents in 17 advanced democracies merged with data on several national and international indicators, this study examines how the probability of participating in protest has changed over time as a result of these two forms of globalization. The results of multivariate, multilevel analysis combined with simulations indicate that trends in political globalization have expanded protest activity, while trends in economic globalization have limited that expansion. These results suggest that social movement scholarship should continue to examine the implications of globalization for protest behavior and other social movement dynamics.

This article examines the mutually constitutive relationship between global institutions and local social movements. First, drawing on social movement theories and the world society approach, it develops a theoretical framework for understanding the transformative impact of global human rights on local activism. Using interviews and archival and other data sources, the empirical analysis demonstrates that global human rights galvanized (1) the politically dormant Ainu into a thriving indigenous rights movement, (2) the politically active but factious resident Koreans into a more united and successful social movement, and (3) an established Burakumin movement into an international human rights organization. The fundamental similarity of rising activism for all three groups supports the world society thesis, but in-depth examination of concrete mechanisms unpacks complex global-local interplay and reveals intranational diversity in the impact of global human rights. Second, drawing on organizational institutionalism, I examine how local activism feeds back to global institutions. The empirical analysis details how local actors consolidate and expand global human rights.

The human rights movement has traditionally focused on documenting abuses, rather than attempting to explain them. In recent years, however, the question of the ‘root causes’ of violations has emerged as a key issue in human rights work. The present article examines this new (or newly insistent) discourse of root causes. While valuable, it is shown to have significant limitations. It foreshortens the investigation of causes; it treats effects as though they were causes; and it identifies causes only to put them aside. With these points in mind, the article counterposes an alternative approach in which the orienting concept is not root causes, but ‘planned misery.’

The Olympic Games are increasingly used by non-governmental organizations to demand transnational forms of accountability from public authorities. This article assesses the effectiveness of transnational public opinion surrounding the Beijing 2008 Olympics, when the pressure of Western public opinion was exerted upon the government of the world's most populous non-Western nation to improve its human rights record. Utilizing the concepts of ‘imagined global community’ and ‘transnational public sphere’, it finds that the Olympic Games had helped to call into existence a transnational public that ran up against the obstacle posed by the incomplete formation of supra-national forms of governance. The International Olympic Committee, a non-governmental organization, was a weak substitute. Because of the strong desire of Chinese people to take part in transnational deliberations, the article concludes with optimism about the potential of transnational public spheres that include Chinese people to develop toward more effective forms of transnational governance. But the IOC must strengthen the voice of its non-Western members, and Western interlocutors, including the media, must accept their share of the responsibility for creating the conditions for egalitarian dialogue.

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) employs creative playfulness and subversive storytelling in their human rights campaigns and solidarity-building practices. The article focuses on three particular media to illustrate how they construct transnational solidarity: (1) son jarocho music as a medium for organizing the March for Rights, Respect, and Fair Food targeting Publix Supermarkets for human rights abuses like wage theft; (2) mística theater as a medium for organizing the Encuentro gathering to build their campaign against Wendy’s for failing to free their supply chain from worker abuse; and (3) a grassroots community museum as a medium for building support against slavery. Creative playfulness and subversive storytelling contribute to successes built on human rights principles and realized through corporate accountability strategies. The article describes these media, and shows how they overcome challenges of building transnational solidarity. Finally, it suggests how the CIW has influenced recent farmworker strikes in Mexico.

In the last decade, human trafficking has emerged as a new area of research for sociologists and other scholars across a wide range of fields. Globalization has exacerbated the illicit trade of people and their parts within and across territorial borders, generating concern among activists and academics and prompting the development of a burgeoning literature with varying concerns and viewpoints. This article reviews what we know about human trafficking dynamics and trends, its causes, and current responses, including critiques of anti-trafficking efforts. While much work remains to be done in simply mapping current trafficking activities, a transnational sociological framework can help to move theory and research on trafficking forward.

This article discusses the transformation of the classical nation-state, as articulated in contemporary struggles for recognition. Elaborating neoinstitutional world polity theory, it analyses global institutional changes that underlie those transformations. It is claimed that the worldwide diffusion of the classical nation-state model itself has had paradoxical consequences, which have in the long run generated a new model of multicultural citizenship, legitimating the decoupling of state membership, individual rights and national identity. The argument is based on empirical evidence from a semantic analysis of international legal discourse on human rights, particularly in the field of religion. Documentary sources suggest that the content of human rights has changed in the second half of the 20th century; the close link between human rights and national self-determination was superseded by the idea that the protection of human rights requires states to recognize a diversity of primordial or traditional identity groups.

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. This, in turn, influenced how states chose to implement anti-FGC policies and the extent to which they distanced themselves from international actors. Exploring these issues uncovered power differences in acquiescence to international norms, going to the heart of multi-level power relations in the international system.

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 study's core arguments are (1) that the deepening international human rights regime creates opportunities for rights-violating governments to display low-cost legitimating commitments to world norms, leading them to ratify human rights treaties without the capacity or willingness to comply with the provisions; and (2) that among repressive regimes, autonomous ones that are less constrained by domestic forces are more likely to ratify human rights treaties as symbolic commitment, because these sovereigns are free to entertain high levels of decoupling between policy and practice, while constrained governments are more reluctant to incite domestic (and foreign) oppositions and interest groups. The combined outcome is that repressive states ratify human rights treaties at least as frequently as non-repressive ones — particularly those repressive states that have greater autonomy. Our cross-national time-series analyses provide supportive evidence for these arguments.

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. First, Blau and Moneada refuse to ignore a wide array of human misery and suffering simply because there is no individual perpetrator, and thereby defend a range of economic and social rights; and second, they envision remedies that extend beyond formal institutions, and include communities, civil society organizations, and individual citizens in dialogue, sanctions, and reforms. In creating a sociological approach that can inform and act upon human misery, the article is an evocative example of democratic politics pursued with sociological commitment (Bourdieu et ai, 1993; Wacquant, 2005).

We focus on a central aspect of Blau and Moncada's argument: that a wider range of human rights violations ought to be regarded as justiciable, legally actionable, and formally criminalized. Although we share their normative goals, the turn to law they advocate also presents us with concerns. Our goal is to induce a reflexivity about our scholarly and political tools: we interrogate the turn to law in determining the content, scope, and solution for human rights violations by flagging some of how law operates in transnational context.