U.S./Canada

The racial and gendered politics of the 1996 welfare reform movement incorporated an anti-immigrant stance that fundamentally altered non-citizens' access to public benefits. This article focuses on community mobilization efforts to reframe the discourse of the “immigrant welfare problem” in order to restore benefits in the aftermath of the Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. Drawing from two years of participatory research in community organizations, I found immigrant rights groups engaged in a variety of counter-rhetorical strategies.

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.

The U.S. Constitution includes civil and political rights—as individual rights—but does not include what is internationally understood to be “human rights,” namely rights we enjoy as equals, including economic, social, and cultural rights, and protections for vulnerable persons, such as children, minorities, mothers, and refugees.

Since the late 1990s, a growing body of literature has researched the cross-national diffusion of policies that affect lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) communities. Studies stemming from world society consider how state ties to newly emergent global norms regarding the treatment of LGBT communities are a driver of this process. A shortcoming of these studies, however, is that they do not adequately consider which type of ties to global norms are most meaningful for policy adoption.

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) employs creative playfulness and subversive storytelling in their human rights campaigns and solidarity-building practices.

A temporal overlap involving the constructivist turn in sociology and national and transnational human rights struggles has transformed human rights into an important research topic within political sociology.This article establishes the principal sociopolitical research questions in the field of human rights and conducts a review of academic literature on the subject, establishing three main fields of human rights research within the sub-discipline: human rights as the articulating axis for collective action; subject participation in the construction of discourse and the effects of dominat

The authors examine the impact of the international human rights regime on governments' human rights practices.

Much research has shown human rights treaties to be ineffective or even counterproductive, often contributing to greater levels of abuse among countries that ratify them. This article reevaluates the effect of four core human rights treaties on a variety of human rights outcomes. Unlike previous studies, it disaggregates treaty membership to examine the effect of relatively “stronger” and “weaker” commitments.

The article explores a range of themes in the sociology of human rights that arise from recent transformations of war and warfare. Despite declining armed conflict since the end of the Cold War, much military discourse in the post-9/11 context maintains an apocalyptic vision of global threats and total wars. One set of themes relates to changes in the nature and means of wars, such as the use of drones, the robotics revolution and complex irregular warfare.

This article argues that the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann prepares the ground for a genuinely sociological theory of human rights. Through a presentation of Luhmann’s work on human rights, it describes the historical and sociological processes that make visible why human rights emerge as a central feature of modern society. It is argued that the emergence of fundamental freedoms and human rights can be related to the dominant structure of modern society, that is, functional differentiation.