Virtual Library

In the last decade, human trafficking has emerged as a new area of research for sociologists and other scholars across a wide range of fields. Globalization has exacerbated the illicit trade of people and their parts within and across territorial borders, generating concern among activists and academics and prompting the development of a burgeoning literature with varying concerns and viewpoints. This article reviews what we know about human trafficking dynamics and trends, its causes, and current responses, including critiques of anti-trafficking efforts. While much work remains to be done in simply mapping current trafficking activities, a transnational sociological framework can help to move theory and research on trafficking forward.

Adopting a long-term historical perspective, this article examines the growing complexity and the internal tensions of state protection in Western Europe and North America. Beginning with Charles Tilly's theory about state building and organized crime, the discussion follows with a critical analysis of T. H. Marshall's article on citizenship. Arguing that state protection has become far more multifaceted than what Marshall's triadic model suggests, the article shows how this protection frequently transcends the logic of individual rights while increasing the reliance of citizens on the modern state. The last section formulates a critique of the idea formulated by theorists like Manuel Castells that globalization favors a rapid decline of state power. Yet, state protection may not necessarily grow indefinitely, and tax cuts, for example, the ones recently enacted in the United States, could seriously jeopardize a state's capacity to raise revenues and effectively fight older and newer forms of insecurity.

This essay is one of the first collaborative efforts to identify the underlying norms embedded in diverse traditions of Islamic law as these apply to contemporary Muslim communities experiencing conflict or transitioning from conflict. This long overdue endeavor draws upon comparative legal analyses, postconflict justice traditions, global governance, and empirical conflict studies to explore why Islamic legal norms are not often used as a resource for restraint and guidance in contemporary conflict settings. In exploring this puzzle, the authors make the case for strengthening commensurate Islamic and international conflict norms for complex conflicts and postconflict tradition. They also situate Islamic postconflict justice norms—which are too often confined to religious and natural law discussions—into contemporary problems of security policy, conflict prevention, and problems of governance. They indicate the many benefits of such a comparative approach for citizens of diverse Muslim and Arabs states and communities, trying to build pathways out of conflict, and for humanitarian and human rights practitioners working in such arenas toward similar goals. An additional, important benefit in excavating such shari’a norms is in providing the intellectual basis to counter politicized, extremist, and instrumentalist uses of Islamic law to justify extreme uses of political violence across the Middle East, Central and South Asian, and African regions.

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.

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.

The world's peoples face daunting challenges in the twenty-first century. While apologists herald the globalization of capitalism, many people on our planet experience recurring economic exploitation, immiseration, and environmental crises linked to capitalism's spread. Across the globe social movements continue to raise the issues of social justice and democracy. Given the new century's serious challenges, sociologists need to rediscover their roots in a sociology committed to social justice, to cultivate and extend the longstanding “ countersystem” approach to research, to encourage greater self-reflection in sociological analysis, and to re-emphasize the importance of the teaching of sociology. Finally, more sociologists should examine the big social questions of this century, including the issues of economic exploitation, social oppression, and the looming environmental crises. And, clearly, more sociologists should engage in the study of alternative social futures, including those of more just and egalitarian societies. Sociologists need to think deeply and imaginatively about sustainable social futures and to aid in building better human societies.

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 offers a comparative-historical perspective on the moral economy of land. We reconstruct the moral economy of the popular land reform movement that opposed the illegitimate income streams of rentiers and speculators in the early 20th century, tracing the movement’s legacy through a long-run analysis of political party platforms since 1880 in the USA, the UK, Germany and Sweden. We find that the land reformers’ conceptualization of land as a moral good was a key topic in early 20th-century party politics. Parties across the political spectrum called for wide-ranging interventions in unregulated land markets. But despite the movement’s relative success, the new ideal of the ownership society soon gained ground as an alternative to the more radical politics of land decommodification. We find growing multipartisan support for small property owners over time, culminating in the rise of a new moral conceptualization of land as capital. With the recent comeback of the land question, both rural and urban, we conclude that an understanding of historical land reform debates should inform future research toward a much-needed sociology of land.

The analysis of globalization requires attention to the social and political units that are being variously undermined, restructured or facilitated by this process. Sociology has often assumed that the unit of analysis is society, in which economic, political and cultural processes are coterminous, and that this concept maps onto that of nation-state. This article argues that the nation-state is more mythical than real. This is for four reasons: first, there are more nations than states; second, several key examples of presumed nation-states are actually empires; third, there are diverse and significant polities in addition to states, including the European Union and some organized religions; fourth, polities overlap and rarely politically saturate the territory where they are located. An implication of acknowledging the wider range and overlapping nature of polities is to open greater conceptual space for the analysis of gender and ethnicity in analyses of globalization. Finally the article re-conceptualizes `polities' and `society'.