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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.

Nelson Mandela is one of the great moral and political leaders of our time: an international hero whose lifelong dedication to the fight against racial oppression in South Africa won him the Nobel Peace Prize and the presidency of his country. Since his triumphant release in 1990 from more than a quarter century of imprisonment, Mandela has been at the center of the most inspiring political drama in the world. 

Mandela: An Illustrated Autobiography tells the extraordinary story of Nelson Mandela's life, an epic of struggle, setback, renewed hope, and ultimate triumph. With nearly 200 stunning photographs—many of them published here for the first time—and with text adapted from his remarkable memoir Long Walk to Freedom, this moving book captures the indomitable spirit of a moral giant and dramatically portrays his struggle toward freedom. Mandela's journey is vividly and eloquently recounted: the development of his political consciousness, his pivotal role in the formation of the African National Congress Youth League, his years underground—which led to a sentence of life imprisonment in 1964—and his twenty-seven years behind bars. He also movingly recounts the momentous events leading up to his victory in South Africa's first-ever multiracial elections in 1994.

A variety of social movements are coalescing into transnational networks that oppose the polarizing in-equalities, unaccountable corporate power, and declining social and environmental health of free trade. In the process of sharing grievances and resources, many movements are forging cross-border networks and shaping the beginnings of transnational civil societies. This research discusses one network and its efforts to build a transnational civil society, the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras (CJM), a coalition endeavoring to reform exploitative labor relations in Mexico's export processing sector. Using thirty extended interviews, movement documents, and notes from participant observation from 1996 to 2002, the research analyzes the problems and possibilities of transnational movement coalitions as they struggle for reform. Borrowing from scholarship on transnational social movements and coalition building, this research makes two contributions. First, liberal capitalism paradoxically both enables the growth and limits the power of democratic development in transnational civil societies, like national civil societies before it. Second, despite the fact that the CJM has yet to overcome internal disunity and external forces of social control, it shows how coalition building creates transnational cultures of solidarity that inspire movement networks to survive and explore new opportunities for social change.

The article endeavors to address hope to address here ethical obligations that are global in character and that emerge both at a distance and within relations of proximity. The two questions that concern the author are at first quite different from one another. The first is whether any of us have the capacity or inclination to respond ethically to suffering at a distance and what makes that ethical encounter possible, when it does take place. The second is what it means for our ethical obligations when we are up against another person or group, find ourselves invariably joined to those we never chose, and must respond to solicitations in languages we may not understand or even wish to understand. This happens, for instance, at the border of several contested states but also in various moments of geographical proximity—what we might call “up againstness”—the result of populations living in conditions of unwilled adjacency, the result of forced emigration or the redrawing of the boundaries of a nation-state. Of course, presumptions about farness and nearness are already there in most of the accounts of ethics that we know. There are communitarians who do not mind the local, provisional, and sometimes nationalist character of the communities to which they consider themselves ethically bound and whose specific community norms are treated as ethically binding. They valorize nearness as a condition for encountering and Precarious Life, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Cohabitation

This paper illustrates how varieties of cosmopolitanism are shaped through a mutually constitutive set of cultural dispositions and institutional practices that emerge at the interstices of global human right norms and local legal practices. Converging pressures of ‘cosmopolitan imperatives’ and the multiplicity of particularized manifestations are co‐evolving in the context of intercrossings during which distinctive cosmopolitanisms are established. This complex relationship of global normative expectations and their local appropriations is elucidated through the dynamic of recursive cosmopolitization. Suggesting that, local problems are resolved with recourse to global prescriptions while local solutions are inscribed in international institutions consolidating the global Human Rights Regime. The Argentinean case carries conceptual and empirical weight as it underscores the recursivity of cosmopolitization by calibrating the tensions of universalism and particularism at the intersection of global, national and regional scales. Argentina is a paradigmatic instantiation for how cosmopolitanism can emanate in the periphery as local problems are globalized. This, in turn, has resulted in the institutionalization of a global Human Rights Regime which exercises normative and political–legal pressures on how states legitimately deal with human rights abuses. It is this cosmopolitan balance, rather than presuppositions of universalistic exogenous pressures or particularistic national exceptions, which is shaping the cultural and political relevance of human rights norms.

Turkey's relationship with the European Union (EU) is dominated by issues of democratization and human rights and is best approached from a perspective which understands the nature of the cosmopolitan regimes which work to regulate the democratic practices of nation-states and animate citizens and minority groups striving to assert their rights. Cosmopolitan or transnational processes of democratization are frequently perceived by Turkey's Kemalist political elites as being contrary to the interests of domestic harmony and a threat to national integrity. It is argued that the apparent reluctance of the Kemalist elites to embrace greater pluralism and align with the EU's Copenhagen criteria is in fact an attempt to `remake' themselves through political choices framed by global opportunities. In this sense, the mobilization of nationalist resistance to outside `interference' is calculated to secure legitimacy in an increasingly uncertain political environment. In addition, Turkey is increasingly dependent upon the very global processes that are perceived as a threat to national sovereignty, and EU standards and norms offer the means by which Turkey can safeguard national integrity.

Whilst a body of work exists that has engaged with and conceptualised transnational fields, and in particular for this paper, the transnational field of human rights, more work needs to be done to elaborate on the effects of transnational fields, at the national level. Using Bourdieu's field theory, and more recent scholarship that focuses on scalar aspects of fields, this research focuses on a human rights field at the national level in Bahrain. The paper addresses two levels/dimensions of the transnational field of human rights: the transnational level and the national level, focussing on the field's vertical autonomy. Based upon nineteen in‐depth interviews, the research retrieves the biographical trajectories of Bahraini human rights activists and activists from iNGOs with a specific remit that includes Bahrain. The paper argues that the vertical autonomy of the transnational field of human rights has demonstrable field effects at the national level, and that this has a number of implications. First, where transnational fields have greater vertical autonomy, the national level can operate with varying hierarchies, with actors adopting practices that diverge from those acting transnationally. Second, as a result of these scalar differences and the vertical autonomy of the transnational field, actors at the national level may have to adapt their practices, others can be side‐lined as a result of ‘symbolic pollution.’ Third, in order for local actors to engage with transnational advocacy networks, they must be the right type of actor.

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. The article applies contemporary critiques of human rights to the case of Palestine, where this discourse has arguably been used to undermine Palestinians’ political subjectivity and collective struggle, and legitimise outside intervention. Nevertheless, transnational groups critical of Israel, particularly diaspora Jewish organisations, rely on a human rights frame. There are several reasons for this: it offers activists a means to achieve ‘cognitive liberation’, to speak about the issue and to frame their activities so as to attract recruits. The article investigates this paradoxical role of human rights, and recommends understanding it as a language which both constrains and enables the practice of transnational solidarity.

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. The intervention of transnational AIDS institutions not only constrained traditional violent coercion but also generated new forms of “diplomatic repression” through (1) changing repressive motives by moving AIDS from the margin to the center of mainstream politics and (2) supplying resources, networks, and models of action that enabled government organizations to reformulate health social organizations as new repressive actors with innovative repertoires of strategies inside and outside China’s territory.

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.