Virtual Library

This article explores conditions under which global norms change. I use a case study in which the original interpretation of an international agreement on intellectual property rights was modified to address demands for improved access to affordable AIDS drugs. Conventional theories that focus on international negotiations cannot fully account for the events in this case. Drawing on the theory of recursivity and insights from the literature on diffusion, I suggest that shifts in global norms occur through reactive diffusion of policies across states. Experiences accumulated in this ongoing process of reinvention eventually lead to a new, globally accepted reinterpretation of the original obligation.

By the time Congress passed the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, many employers had created maternity leave programs. Analysts argue that they did so in response to the feminization of the workforce. This study charts the spread of maternity leave policies between 1955 and 1985 in a sample of 279 organizations. Sex discrimination law played a key role in the rise of maternity leave policies. Building on neoinstitutional theory, this article explores how the separation of powers shapes employer response to law. Details of the law are often specified in administrative rulings‐the weakest link in the law because they can be overturned by the courts and by Congress. Yet an administrative ruling requiring employers with disability leave programs to permit maternity leave, which employers successfully fought in the courts, was at least as effective as the identical congressional statute that replaced it. In the American context, the legal vulnerability of administrative rulings can draw attention to them, thus making the weakest link in the law surprisingly powerful.

While most people would not consider sponsoring an orphan's education to be in the same category as international humanitarian aid, both acts are linked by the desire to give. Many studies focus on the outcomes of humanitarian work, but the impulses that inspire people to engage in the first place receive less attention. Disquieting Gifts takes a close look at people working on humanitarian projects in New Delhi to explore why they engage in philanthropic work, what humanitarianism looks like to them, and the ethical and political tangles they encounter.

Motivated by debates surrounding Marcel Mauss's The Gift, Bornstein investigates specific cases of people engaged in humanitarian work to reveal different perceptions of assistance to strangers versus assistance to kin, how the impulse to give to others in distress is tempered by its regulation, suspicions about recipient suitability, and why the figure of the orphan is so valuable in humanitarian discourse. The book also focuses on vital humanitarian efforts that often go undocumented and ignored and explores the role of empathy in humanitarian work.

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.

Genealogies of Citizenship is a remarkable rethinking of human rights and social justice. As global governance is increasingly driven by market fundamentalism, growing numbers of citizens have become socially excluded and internally stateless. Against this movement to organize society exclusively by market principles, Margaret Somers argues that socially inclusive democratic rights must be counterbalanced by the powers of a social state, a robust public sphere and a relationally-sturdy civil society. Through epistemologies of history and naturalism, contested narratives of social capital, and Hurricane Katrina’s racial apartheid, she warns that the growing authority of the market is distorting the non-contractualism of citizenship; rights, inclusion and moral worth are increasingly dependent on contractual market value. In this pathbreaking work, Somers advances an innovative view of rights as public goods rooted in an alliance of public power, political membership, and social practices of equal moral recognition—the right to have rights.

This interdisciplinary article argues that human rights must be understood in terms of opportunities for social participation and that social and economic rights are integral to any discussion of the subject. We offer both a social constructionist and a normative framework for a sociology of human rights which reaches beyond liberal individualism, combining insights from the work of Amartya Sen and from French convention theory. Following Sen, we argue that human rights are founded on the promotion of human capabilities as ethical demands shaped by public reasoning. Using French convention theory, we show how the terms of such deliberation are shaped by different constructions of collectively held values and the compromises reached between them. We conclude by demonstrating how our approach offers a new perspective on spheres of public action and the role these should play in promoting social cohesion, individual capabilities and human rights.

In this article, I investigate responses to the humanitarian crisis that emerged following the May 2008 xenophobic violence against South African nonnationals that resulted in 62 deaths and the displacement of well over 30,000 people. I focus specifically on how a South African AIDS activist movement, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and its partners, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF—Doctors Without Borders) and the AIDS Law Project (ALP), translated a particular style and strategy of AIDS activism into legal, medical, humanitarian, and political responses to the massive population displacement. The TAC provided relief to displaced people in the form of basic needs, such as food, clothes, and blankets, as well as legal aid, and it engaged in activism that promoted the rights of the refugees. I investigate how the ideas and practices of global agencies such as the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) were deployed and reinterpreted by TAC activists. I also examine how TAC activists involved in assisting the refugees drew on a global humanitarian assemblage of categories, legal definitions, norms and standards, and procedures and technologies that went beyond the simple management of “bare life.” TAC’s shift from fighting for antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) to fighting for refugees’ rights reveals a “politics of life” that spans multiple issues, networks, and constituencies. It is also a politics that, at times, strategically deploys standardized bureaucratic logics and biopolitical techniques of humanitarian aid

The field of global health has roots in the AIDS pandemic of the late 20th century, when the installation of health care systems supplanted older, low-cost prevention programs to help stem the spread of HIV in low- and middle-income Africa. Today's global health is rooted the belief that healthcare is a human right, and that by promoting health we can cultivate equity and social justice in places where such values aren't always found.

An Introduction to Global Health Delivery is a short but immersive introduction to global health's origins, actors, interventions, and challenges. Informed by physician Joia Mukherjee's quarter-century of experience fighting disease and poverty in more than a dozen countries, it delivers a clear-eyed overview of the movement underway to reduce global health disparities and establish sustainable access to care, including details of what has worked so far -- and what hasn't.

Grounded in the historical and social factors that propagate health disparities and enriched with case studies and exercises that encourage readers to think critically about the subject matter, this text is the essential starting point for readers of any background seeking a practical grounding in global health's promise and progress. 

Pathologies of Power uses harrowing stories of illness, of life—and death—in extreme situations to interrogate our understanding of human rights. Paul Farmer, a physician and anthropologist with twenty years of experience studying diseases in Haiti, Peru, and Russia, argues that promoting the social and economic rights of the world’s poor is the most important human rights struggle of our times. A thoughtful memoir with passionate eyewitness accounts from the prisons of Russia and the beleaguered villages of Haiti and Chiapas, this book links the lived experiences of individual victims to a broader analysis of structural violence. Farmer challenges conventional thinking within human rights circles and exposes the relationships between political and economic injustice, on one hand, and the suffering and illness of the powerless, on the other.

Directed at a diverse audience of students, legal and public health practitioners, and anyone interested in understanding what human rights-based approaches (HRBAs) to health and development mean and why they matter, Power, Suffering, and the Struggle for Dignity provides a solid foundation for comprehending what a human rights framework implies and the potential for social transformation it entails. Applying a human rights framework to health demands that we think about our own suffering and that of others, as well as the fundamental causes of that suffering. What is our agency as human subjects with rights and dignity, and what prevents us from acting in certain circumstances? What roles are played by others in decisions that affect our health? How do we determine whether what we may see as “natural” is actually the result of mutable, human policies and practices?