Virtual Library

This article explores the Pinochet case, widely heralded as a landmark, as a case of ‘intermestic’ human rights that raises difficult normative and empirical questions concerning cosmopolitan justice. The article is a contribution to the sociology of human rights from the perspective of methodological cosmopolitanism, developing conceptual tools and methods to study how cosmopolitanizing state institutions and cultural norms are inter-related. The argument is made that in order to understand issues of cosmopolitan justice, sociologists must give more consideration to political culture.

Understanding how the idea of culture is mobilized in discursive contests is crucial for both theorizing and building multicultural democracies. To investigate this, I analyze a debate over whether we should relieve the “cultural need” for infibulation among immigrants by offering a “nick” in U.S. hospitals. Using interviews, newspaper coverage, and primary documents, I show that physicians and opponents of the procedure with contrasting models of culture disagreed on whether it represented cultural change. Opponents argued that the “nick” was fairly described as “female genital mutilation” and symbolically identical to more extensive cutting. Using a reified model, they imagined Somalis to be “culture-bound”; the adoption of a “nick” was simply a move from one genital cutting procedure to another. Unable to envision meaningful cultural adaptation, and presupposing the incompatibility of multiculturalism and feminism, they supported forced assimilation. Physicians, drawing on a dynamic model of culture, believed that adoption of the “nick” was meaningful cultural change, but overly idealized their ability to protect Somali girls from both Somali and U.S. patriarchy. Unduly confident, they failed to take oppression seriously, dismissing relevant constituencies and their concerns. Both models, then, influenced the outcome of this cultural conflict by shaping the perceptions of cultural change in problematic ways. Given the high-profile nature of “culture” in contemporary politics, these findings may very well extend to other issues that crystallize the supposed incommensurability of feminism and multiculturalism, as well as the wider debates about how societies can be both diverse and socially just.

The essay examines some of the changes in the author’s thinking about the politics of engaging in international law since the original publication of the article that opened the first issue of EJIL in 1990. The essay points to the change of focus from indeterminacy (to which the author is as committed as ever) of legal arguments to the structural biases of international institutions. It then discusses the politics of definition, that is to say, the strategic practice of defining international situations and problems in new expert languages so as to gain control over them. It attacks the increasing ‘managerialism’ in the field and ends with a few reflections about the significance of the moment of the establishment of the Journal 20 years ago.

Sociologists have long examined how states, intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), and professional groups interact in order to institutionalize their preferred norms at the transnational level. Yet, explanations of global norm-making that emphasize inter-organizational negotiations do not adequately explain the intra-organizational script-writing—that is, the codification of norms in prescriptive behavioral templates—that underpins this process. This article opens the black box of how scripts emerge and institutionalize within IGOs. Script-writing is a function of both world-cultural frames and material interests, held by different intra-organizational actors: scientific IGO staff and state representatives in governing bodies, respectively. The interplay between these frames and interests determines whether scripts will institutionalize. In this theoretical model, world-cultural and power-political explanations are pertinent to different, mutually informing, and coexisting aspects of the script-writing process. As a corollary of our approach, we present a conceptual framework for the study of intra-IGO script-writing, which is contingent on three normative struggles: among IGO staff, within an IGO’s board of directors, and between the staff and the board. To empirically substantiate our arguments, we examine scripts on taxation and capital controls by the International Monetary Fund. We conclude by discussing the broader implications of our model for the study of international organizations and the engines of global norm-making.

The essays explain the anti-democratic features and limits of Soviet-type totalitarian systems of power. They discuss such concepts as ideology, democracy, civil liberty, law and the state from a perspective which is radically different from that of people living in liberal western democracies. The authors also discuss the prospects for democratic change under totalitarian conditions. Steven Lukes' introduction provides an invaluable political and historical context for these writings. The authors represent a very broad spectrum of democratic opinion, including liberal, conservative and socialist.

In bracketing certain "Western" Enlightenment truths we hold and defend as self-evident at home in order to engage theoretically a multiplicity of alternative truths encoded in our reified notion of culture, anthropologists may be "suspending the ethical" in our dealings with the "other." Cultural relativism, read as moral relativism, is no longer appropriate to the world in which we live, and anthropology, if it is to be worth anything at all, must he ethically grounded. This paper is an attempt to imagine what forms a politically committed and morally engaged anthropology might take.

This paper explores various aspects of the problem of perspectivism in Max Weber’s sociology as a component of the legacy of Friedrich Nietzsche in order to examine the contribution, if any, of sociological thinking to the understanding of human rights. In this inquiry I am more concerned with the theoretical contribution to the analysis of relativism in relation to rights rather than with the sociological analysis of which empirical conditions do or do not promote political respect for the exercise of human rights.

What does it mean for Inuit to cooperate with the (disavowed) desires that emerge in a colonial bureaucracy dedicated to improving Inuit lives? In this article, I consider the psychic life of biopolitics in the context of welfare colonialism in the Canadian Arctic. I suggest that the colonial desire that Inuit cooperate in their own survival is haunted by other desires the colonist can never name and that such unspeakable desires are also at work in the response to the contemporary suicide epidemic among Inuit youth. Attention to Inuit naming practices provides an alternate way of linking death, desire, and community in a postcolonial world.

The account of one of history's most brutal—and forgotten—massacres, when the Japanese army destroyed China's capital city on the eve of World War II, "piecing together the abundant eyewitness reports into an undeniable tapestry of horror. In December 1937, the Japanese army swept into the ancient city of Nanking. Within weeks, more than 300,000 Chinese civilians and soldiers were systematically raped, tortured, and murdered—a death toll exceeding that of the atomic blasts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Historian Iris Chang tells the story from three perspectives: that of the Japanese soldiers, that of the Chinese, and that of a group of Westerners who refused to abandon the city and created a safety zone that saved almost 300,000 Chinese. More than just narrating the details of an orgy of violence, in The Rape of Nanking Chang analyzes the militaristic culture that fostered in the Japanese soldiers a total disregard for human life. It also tells of the concerted effort during the Cold War on the part of the West and even China to stifle open discussion of this atrocity. Drawing on extensive interviews with survivors and documents brought to light for the first time, Iris Chang's classic is the definitive history of this horrifying episode.

The Right to Play Oneself collects for the first time Thomas Waugh’s essays on the politics, history, and aesthetics of documentary film, written between 1974 and 2008. Woven through the volume is the relationship of the documentary with the history of the Left, including discussions of LGBT documentary pioneers and the firebrand collectives that changed the history of documentary.