Virtual Library

The number of people living with HIV in the USA increased by 50% to 1.115 million persons from 1996 to 2006 and may exceed 1.5 million by 2015. The rising caseloads are straining the HIV care system, while recession and the unknown fate of health reforms are sources of uncertainty. HIV care in the USA evolved within a fragmented healthcare system. Unique community-based support and education linked to diverse multidisciplinary HIV care teams contributed to ‘AIDS exceptionalism’.

Why do so few live-in migrant domestic workers (MDWs) in Singapore utilize their weekly rest-day entitlement? Using data drawn from 3,886 online profiles of prospective MDWs and 40 interview sessions with MDWs, employers, and manpower agencies, we demonstrate how the industry encourages a “logic of submission” around rest-days. Through processual analysis, we unearth multiple, repeated moments of capitulation at key moments in a MDW’s work-life: (1) their interactions with a recruitment agency while still in their home country; (2) their matching with an overseas employer; (3) the duration of their two-year contract; and (4) the time of contract renewal. Submission to less frequent rest-days can secure their employability and financial mobility but also further individuates the MDW within the employer’s household and may lead to the engraining of a habitus of submissiveness towards their employers that can open the door to workers’ exploitation. We demonstrate how nationality and work experience further inflect this logic of submission to motivate non-Filipina and inexperienced MDWs to request even fewer rest-days than their counterparts. By combining feminist migration scholarship on Asian MDWs, with a sociology of law analysis, we offer up an example of how the same act of submission can simultaneously embody both resistance and victimhood depending upon the temporal and spatial scale used, and varying interpretations of the rest-day benefit as a much-needed respite, a monetizable benefit, or a signaling mechanism.

Recent decades are marked by an impressive expansion of actors and legal structures intended to globally extend a certain ‘Western’ catalog of human rights. Recently, too, legal scholars have developed concepts to justify normatively the expansion of human rights (e.g. Habermas, Walker, Koskenniemi). This article reviews recent legal literature on global constitutionalization of human rights to reveal its blind spots, at two levels: i) the reaffirmation of European precedency for establishing the sources of human rights and ii) a lack of sociological tools for describing interpenetrations between law, power and social inequalities. In order to empirically illustrate these objections, the article analyses the recent global expansion of human rights of minorities, using two examples: cases treated by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the Brazilian legalization of ancestral territories of afro-descendants. Finally, the article argues for a decentered perspective that (at the local level) connects human rights with concrete claims for justice.

Most studies of rape-law reform outcomes focus on single cases. We advance this literature by studying outcomes more systematically—leveraging new cross-national and longitudinal reform data—and showing that reform outcomes have both global and national determinants. Our exploratory analyses show three main findings: (1) Rape-law reforms are strongly associated with elevated police reporting between 1945 and 2005. (2) The strength of the association depends on domestic contexts. The association is stronger in countries characterized by individualism, women's mobilization, wealth, and education; it is weaker in countries with greater democracy and police strength. (3) The strength of the association also depends on global contexts. It is stronger in countries with dense linkages to world society and weaker under conditions of global institutionalization, as widespread diffusion gives rise to both ceremony without substance (i.e., domestic rape-law reforms without subsequent increases in reporting) and substance without ceremony (increased police reporting without antecedent reforms). In multivariate regression analyses, rape-law reforms, women's mobilization, and links to world society all have positive and significant effects on police reporting. It appears that both global and domestic contexts—together and independently—importantly shape policy and practice.

World polity theorists suggest that, over the last half century, policies on homosexuality have been liberalized throughout the world; other scholars argue that gay rights continue to face strong, possibly growing opposition. This article takes a different perspective. I argue that the global social space has grown increasingly articulated around homosexuality. Drawing on data from 174 countries between 1970 and 2015, I analyze the novel adoption of rationalized state policies regarding same-sex sexuality, evidenced by the rise of both supportive and repressive laws. Some of these approaches target homosexuality as a practice, while others target cultural questions that are relevant to gay people’s lives. How countries position themselves along these dimensions depends on specific national characteristics, including economic capital, geopolitical clout and connections, and racial and colonial legacies.

Translated by Assenka Oksiloff.

Can collective memories of the past shape the future? If one of the fears about a globalized society is the homogenization of culture, can it nevertheless be true that the homogenization of memory might have a positive impact on political and cultural norms? Originally published in Germany, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age examines the nature of collective memory in a globalized world, and how the memory of one particular event--the Holocaust--helped give rise to an emerging global consensus on human rights. Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider show how memories of the Holocaust have been de-contextualized from the original event and offer a framework for interpreting contemporary acts of injustice such as ethnic cleansing and genocide. Representations of mass atrocities in Bosnia and Kosovo during the 1990s resonated with iconographies of the Holocaust and played a significant role in the political and military interventions in the Balkans. Subsequently, these representations have had a crucial impact on the consolidation of international human rights and related issues of transitional justice, reparations, and restitution.

This study revisits the place of the Holocaust and the French revolutionary tradition in the birth of international human rights law, with particular reference to the genesis of the Universal Declaration and European Convention. It argues against conceptualizing the drafting of the Universal Declaration as an exceptional moment of Holocaust remembrance in the immediate aftermath of the war, positing instead that the framers' silence on the Jewish identity of the victims of Nazi genocidal acts functioned as an instrument of consensus politics. The article also examines how figures on the French far right practiced their own form of consensus politics by recasting their counterrevolutionary corporatist agenda in the idiom of human rights. 

Food was a critical front in the Cold War battle for Asia. "Where Communism goes, hunger follows" was the slogan of American nation builders who fanned out into the countryside to divert rivers, remodel villages, and introduce tractors, chemicals, and genes to multiply the crops consumed by millions. This "green revolution" has been credited with averting Malthusian famines, saving billions of lives, and jump-starting Asia's economic revival. Bono and Bill Gates hail it as a model for revitalizing Africa's economy. But this tale of science triumphant conceals a half century of political struggle from the Afghan highlands to the rice paddies of the Mekong Delta, a campaign to transform rural societies by changing the way people eat and grow food.

The ambition to lead Asia into an age of plenty grew alongside development theories that targeted hunger as a root cause of war. Scientific agriculture was an instrument for molding peasants into citizens with modern attitudes, loyalties, and reproductive habits. But food policies were as contested then as they are today. While Kennedy and Johnson envisioned Kansas-style agribusiness guarded by strategic hamlets, Indira Gandhi, Marcos, and Suharto inscribed their own visions of progress onto the land.

Out of this campaign, the costliest and most sustained effort for development ever undertaken, emerged the struggles for resources and identity that define the region today. As Obama revives the lost arts of Keynesianism and counter-insurgency, the history of these colossal projects reveals bitter and important lessons for today's missions to feed a hungry world.

A recurring theme in the sociology of human rights is the vast decoupling that exists between the formal codification of these rights in principle and their implementation in practice, fueling much debate about the effectiveness of international law. Yet, despite this disjuncture, a deeper question remains: given all the barriers that have impeded the realization of human rights, why have they become so widely institutionalized? Revisiting previous work in this journal, I argue that one important component of the expansion of human rights is the rise of the universal, egalitarian individual as the primary entity of social organization in world society. Additionally, I explore how the nature of human rights law itself promotes widespread decoupling that, in turn, fuels ongoing efforts to close the gap between principle and practice. Indeed, while human rights law envisions an ideal world that is practically unrealizable, it inspires a never-ending, global crusade to bring about that vision.

Women's political representation, once considered unacceptable by politicians and their publics, is now actively encouraged by powerful international actors. In this article, the authors ask how the growth and discourse of the international women's movement affected women's acquisition of political power over time. To answer this question, they use event history techniques to address women's political representation in more than 150 countries over 110 years (1893–2003). They consider multiple political outcomes: female suffrage, first female parliamentarian, and achievement of 10, 20, and 30 percent women in a country's national legislature. The findings show that increasing global pressure for the inclusion of women in international politics and the changing discourse of the international women's movement help to explain women's acquisition of these multiple political outcomes. Furthermore, by adding these concepts to traditional domestic models of women in politics, the authors demonstrate that country-level political, social structural, and cultural characteristics cause countries to act in conjunction with, or in opposition to, these global pressures. This is the first time that research on women in politics has considered such a comprehensive list of countries, time points, and outcomes.