Virtual Library

This special section of Health and Human Rights Journal focuses much-needed attention on tuberculosis (TB) and human rights—particularly the right to health. Even as TB has surpassed HIV as the top infectious disease killer in the world and the global threat from multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) continues to grow, approaches to fighting the disease remain primarily biomedical and public health-based.1 These traditional approaches dominate global and national TB programs and research on the disease, and they largely ignore the underlying social, economic, and structural factors driving the epidemic and drug resistance. All the while, the highest TB burdens exist where vulnerability and marginalization increase the risk of infection and disease and erect barriers to accessing testing and treatment services.

The six papers and two perspectives in this special section cover diverse topics and concerns related to TB and the right to health, with a broad geographic scope. Nonetheless, key issues and themes emerge and cut across multiple papers. These include:

• the lack of adequate research and development of health technologies for TB and the right to benefit from scientific progress;
• imprisonment and compulsory treatment of people with TB;
• human rights-based approaches to TB in advocacy, litigation, and assessment strategies; and
• accountability and the human rights obligations of governments and international organizations to prevent and treat TB.

One of the major issues attracting the attention of scholars studying global norm regimes, especially the human rights regime, is their impact on domestic settings. Borrowing from organizational studies, some of these scholars have used the term decoupling to conceptualize the widespread phenomenon of states that sign conventions but do not implement these conventions’ norms. In this article, we introduce the concept of differentiated decoupling, arguing that the implementation of human rights norms needs to be rethought and reoperationalized. We present a case study—the right to vote in the United States—to illustrate our argument that it is vital to disaggregate the decoupling processes and examine the different social groups within the state rather than limit scrutiny to the state level. We further contend that in order to explain differentiated decoupling, perspectives developed and used by sociologists who study inequality need to be adopted. In this way, scholars can capture the unequal distribution of human rights in domestic settings and begin to untangle the forces leading to differentiated decoupling. An analysis of differentiated decoupling helps reveal that “more human rights” sometimes means more human rights to one group and less to another, suggesting that implementation of human rights norms may even deepen stratification.

To mobilize support for war and to control dissent, governments draw upon deeply engrained discourses regarding soldiering and the citizen's duty to support the troops. We identify the cultural and political evolution of the discursive legacy of “support the troops” from the Vietnam War through the Iraq War. Using longitudinal and comparative organizational analyses, we analyze how this discursive legacy was engaged by U.S. peace movement organizations (PMOs). PMOs frequently made positive references to U.S. troops during both the Gulf War and Iraq War, creating a stable discourse centered around supporting the troops. Moreover, during the Gulf War the movement expanded the web of support by asking who else should be cared about beyond the troops, thus de-coupling the support discourse from the nation and the state. During the Iraq War, PMOs also developed an elaborated “discourse of betrayal” by redefining what it means to support the troops. Here they deployed proactive, anticipatory discourses, turning the tables on the Bush administration. PMOs also increasingly criticized the troops during the Iraq War due to well publicized human rights abuses. The findings demonstrate that movement discourses are both stable and flexible, influenced by past rounds of discursive contention as well as contemporary political events. We highlight the cultural constraints imposed on movements by dominant discursive legacies, and the strategic responses made by movements in response to emerging discursive opportunities.

Desegregation has been one of the only legally enforceable routes of access and opportunity for millions of school children. Yet even as the nation celebrated the 40th anniversary of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, Gary Orfield, Director of the Harvard Project on School Desegregation, began to attract national attention by identifying and documenting the insidious trend toward the resegregation of our public schools.

This article argues that democratic deepening is shaped by shifting civil society-state relations that can only be understood by disaggregating democratic deepening into its component parts of participation, representation, and stateness. This frame is used to explore the divergent democratic trajectories of Brazil, India, and South Africa. Through the examples of local government transformation and social movement mobilization, I argue that a “project” civil society in Brazil has deepened democracy and transformed the state. In contrast, in South Africa and India civil society is increasingly being subordinated to political society. In South Africa, an active civil society has largely been sidelined as a politically consequential actor (containerization) and in India much of civil society has been fragmented and instrumentalized (involution).

The article contends that the attitudes of the majority population towards the allocation of political rights to out-group populations are distinct from attitudes towards the allocation of social rights. Data obtained from an attitudinal survey administered to a representative sample of Israeli adults show that the level of objection to the allocation of rights to labour migrants in the political sphere is twice as high as that found in the social sphere. Multivariate analysis demonstrates that attitudes towards the granting of political and social rights not only differ in the degree of objection, but are also differentially affected by the social and economic characteristics of the population. Further analysis examines the effect of perceived socio-economic threat, threat to national identity and prejudice on attitudes towards the allocation of rights. This analysis reveals that different mechanisms underlie the formation of attitudes towards the allocation of rights in the political and social arenas. The findings are discussed in light of previous research and theory.

This study documents and explains historical variation in U.S. criminal deportations. Results from time-series analyses suggest that criminal deportations increase during times of rising unemployment, and this effect is partly mediated by an elevated discourse about immigration and labor. An especially strong association between deportations and unemployment emerges from 1941 through 1986, a period in which the federal law enforcement bureaucracy and deportation laws were well established and judges retained substantial discretion. After 1986, changes in criminal deportation rates mirror the trend in incarceration rates. The study connects the burgeoning sociological literatures on immigration and punishment, revealing a historically contingent effect of labor markets on the criminal deportation of noncitizen offenders.

Lesbians, prostitutes, women likely to have sex across racial lines, "brought to the United States for immoral purposes," or "arriving in a state of pregnancy"—national threats, one and all. Since the late nineteenth century, immigrant women’s sexuality has been viewed as a threat to national security, to be contained through strict border-monitoring practices. By scrutinizing this policy, its origins, and its application, Eithne Luibhéid shows how the U.S. border became a site not just for controlling female sexuality but also for contesting, constructing, and renegotiating sexual identity.

Initially targeting Chinese women, immigration control based on sexuality rapidly expanded to encompass every woman who sought entry to the United States. The particular cases Luibhéid examines-efforts to differentiate Chinese prostitutes from wives, the 1920s exclusion of Japanese wives to reduce the Japanese-American birthrate, the deportation of a Mexican woman on charges of lesbianism, the role of rape in mediating women’s border crossings today—challenge conventional accounts that attribute exclusion solely to prejudice or lack of information. This innovative work clearly links sexuality-based immigration exclusion to a dominant nationalism premised on sexual, gender, racial, and class hierarchies.