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By reassessing the history of the civil rights movement and examining questions and areas of research that need to be addressed by future studies, New Directions in Civil Rights Studies challenges students of the civil rights movement to broaden their vision and, at the same time, to look more closely at the people, the communities, and the networks that provide the rich texture of the movement's history.

This study asks one crucial question: How do Lebanese women apply available social capital and informal social networks to engage in political activism for women’s rights? Building on social- and women’s-movement theories, I argue that Lebanese feminists do not exclusively operate in the public sphere in their fight for political goals, nor do they privilege only the extra-family space. On the contrary, they engage in political activities by using extended family networks as a form of weak social ties. I construct this argument on the basis of interviews, observations, and analysis of Lebanese feminists’ writings. This paper introduces the concept of mahsoubieh as a form of weak social ties generated within connective family networks. Specifically, I examine how elite, intellectual, and middle-class Lebanese women activists use the positive social capital generated by mahsoubieh to gain credibility, diffuse their political stances, and develop countervailing power. Aspects such as the size, reputation, and respectability of their kinship networks aided the Lebanese women in their fight to change the legal structure concerning women’s rights and political representation.

Written during the 1940s and early 1950s, when Baldwin was only in his twenties, the essays collected in Notes of a Native Son capture a view of black life and black thought at the dawn of the civil rights movement and as the movement slowly gained strength through the words of one of the most captivating essayists and foremost intellectuals of that era. Writing as an artist, activist, and social critic, Baldwin probes the complex condition of being black in America. With a keen eye, he examines everything from the significance of the protest novel to the motives and circumstances of the many black expatriates of the time, from his home in "The Harlem Ghetto" to a sobering "Journey to Atlanta."

Notes of a Native Son inaugurated Baldwin as one of the leading interpreters of the dramatic social changes erupting in the United States in the twentieth century, and many of his observations have proven almost prophetic. His criticism on topics such as the paternalism of white progressives or on his own friend Richard Wright's work is pointed and unabashed. He was also one of the few writing on race at the time who addressed the issue with a powerful mixture of outrage at the gross physical and political violence against black citizens and measured understanding of their oppressors, which helped awaken a white audience to the injustices under their noses. Naturally, this combination of brazen criticism and unconventional empathy for white readers won Baldwin as much condemnation as praise.

The vocabulary of “reasonableness” invokes a wide margin of discretion that is often needed to temper the excessive rigour of legal rules and to deal with the inevitable problems of over- and under-inclusion associated with application of formal law to individual cases. The acceptability of the use of discretion by a law-applying institution such as the Israeli High Court of Justice is based on the assumption that its preferences and moral sensibilities are broadly reflective of the preferences and sensibilities of the community in which it exercises its jurisdiction. When jurisdiction is exercised in conditions of occupation, however, such consensus cannot be easily presumed. On the contrary, recourse to moral pathos by an institution of the occupying power will appear to normalize its jurisdiction and add an element of hypocrisy to the felt illegitimacy of its possessing jurisdiction in the first place. Moreover, it will undermine the moral and political significance of the fact of the occupation, even diminishing the urgency of bringing it to an end.

In popular, scholarly, and legal discourse, psychological trauma is an experience that belongs to victims. While we expect victims of crimes to suffer trauma, we never ask whether perpetrators likewise experience those same crimes as trauma. Indeed, if we consider trauma in the perpetration of a crime at all, it is usually to inquire whether a terrible experience earlier in life drove a person toward wrongdoing. We are loath to acknowledge that the commission of the crime itself may cause some perpetrators to experience their own psychological injury and scarring.

This article aims to fill this gap in our understanding of crime and trauma by initiating a long-overdue conversation about perpetrator trauma. Specifically, this article argues that perpetrator trauma exists and merits attention. In doing so, it traces a cultural evolution in the concept of trauma from a psychological category to a moral one, and in response, it proposes a counternarrative of trauma—one that recognizes trauma as a neutral, human trait, divorced from morality, and not incompatible with choice and agency.

Finally, this article argues that we ignore this counternarrative of trauma at our peril. Acknowledging the reality of perpetrator trauma can improve reconciliation efforts in the aftermath of mass atrocity by exposing the need to rehabilitate perpetrators. As importantly, recognizing perpetrator trauma erodes the all-too-common perception of perpetrators as cartoonish monsters by exposing their ordinariness and humanity. The point is not to generate sympathy for a génocidaire. But recognizing him as a person who chose to kill, and who now suffers because of it, can illuminate both the roots of his crimes and the real horror undergirding them—that perpetrators are merely people, and that any other person could do the same. In exposing these overlooked aspects of crime, this article unsettles understandings of suffering and violence, challenges the categories of perpetrator and victim, and makes clear that the question of how to respond to mass atrocity is even more complex than we know.

How can we think about people and cultures unlike our own? In the early modern period, the fact of human diversity presented Europeans with little cause for anxiety: they simply assumed the superiority of the West. During the 18th century this view was gradually abandoned, as thinkers argued that other peoples possessed reason and sensibility, and thus deserved the same respect that Westerners accorded themselves. Since that time, however, Enlightenment belief in the universalities of human nature has fallen into disrepute; critics allege that such notions have had disastrous consequences in the 20th century, ranging from prejudice to persecution and outright genocide.

This article defends the claim that human rights is a legitimate subject of inquiry for sociologists, and proceeds to present the case for a particular application of sociological theory to the understanding of gross human rights violations. Sociology, it claims, is equipped to study the dynamics of social institutions – socially constructed language-structures within which social action is framed – and since the mid-20th century, human rights has become such an institution. The article advocates an intellectual project for the sociology of rights, drawing on a diverse range of sources, that recognises how human rights abuses are made possible when the very concept of the ‘human’ is subtly redefined through these language-structures.

By the end of the eighteenth century, politicians in America and France were invoking the natural rights of man to wrest sovereignty away from kings and lay down universal basic entitlements. Exactly how and when did “rights” come to justify such measures? In On the Spirit of Rights, Dan Edelstein answers this question by examining the complex genealogy of the rights that regimes enshrined in the American and French Revolutions. With a lively attention to detail, he surveys a sprawling series of debates among rulers, jurists, philosophers, political reformers, writers, and others who were all engaged in laying the groundwork for our contemporary systems of constitutional governance. Every seemingly new claim about rights turns out to be a variation on a theme, as late medieval notions were subtly repeated and refined to yield the talk of “rights” we recognize today. From the Wars of Religion to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, On the Spirit of Rights is a sweeping tour through centuries of European intellectual history and an essential guide to our ways of thinking about human rights today.

Macrolevel theories of social movement emergence posit that political opportunity “opens the door” for collective action. This article uses the case of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising to show that collective action need not always require opportunity. Warsaw Jews’ armed resistance was a response not to opportunity but to a lack thereof. Equally important was a strong sense of honor among the ghetto fighters: the hopelessness of their situation helped construct a motivational frame that equated resistance with honor and made collective resistance possible. This case therefore illustrates how framing processes can mediate structural conditions to produce collective action in the absence of opportunity. It also points to the need for additional research on protest and resistance in nondemocratic settings.

Although the study of citizenship has been an important development in contemporary sociology, the nature of rights has been largely ignored. The analysis of human rights presents a problem for sociology, in which cultural relativism and the fact-value distinction have largely destroyed the classical tradition of the natural-law basis for rights discourse. This critique of the idea of universal rights was prominent in the work of Marx, Durkheim and Weber. However, recent developments in the organisation of nation states, the globalisation of political issues, the transformation of family life, and changes in medical technology in relation to human reproduction have brought the question of human rights to the forefront of social and political debate. The paper argues that a sociology of rights is important, because there are obvious limitations to the idea of citizenship, which is based on membership of a nation state. Existing conceptualisations of citizenship require the supplement of rights theory. It is argued that sociology can ground the analysis of human rights in a concept of human frailty, especially the vulnerability of the body, in the idea of the precariousness of social institutions, and in a theory of moral sympathy. These three analytical supports - ontological frailty, social precariousness, and moral sympathy - are partly derived from the philosophical anthropology of Arnold Gehlen, from Ulrich Beck's concept of the risk society, and Max Scheler's phenomenology of sympathy. Emodied frailty is a human universal condition, which is compounded by the risky and precarious nature of social institutions. Human vulnerability can be contained or ameliorated by the institution of rights which protect human beings from this ontological uncertainty. From a sociological perspective, rights are social claims for institutionalised protection. However, it is because of collective sympathy for the plight of others that moral communities are created which support the institution of rights. This thesis not only offers a sociological version of traditional notions of natural or inalienable rights, but also attempts to provide a sociological alternative to enlightenment theories of social contract and individual rights.