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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.

This article examines the mutually constitutive relationship between global institutions and local social movements. First, drawing on social movement theories and the world society approach, it develops a theoretical framework for understanding the transformative impact of global human rights on local activism. Using interviews and archival and other data sources, the empirical analysis demonstrates that global human rights galvanized (1) the politically dormant Ainu into a thriving indigenous rights movement, (2) the politically active but factious resident Koreans into a more united and successful social movement, and (3) an established Burakumin movement into an international human rights organization. The fundamental similarity of rising activism for all three groups supports the world society thesis, but in-depth examination of concrete mechanisms unpacks complex global-local interplay and reveals intranational diversity in the impact of global human rights. Second, drawing on organizational institutionalism, I examine how local activism feeds back to global institutions. The empirical analysis details how local actors consolidate and expand global human rights.

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. Human rights are considered as a social institution, whereby modern society protects its own structure against self-destructive tendencies. By giving inalienable and equal rights to all human beings, society ensures that the differentiation between different functional subsystems is maintained and at the same time institutionalizes specific mechanisms to increase stability and protection of the individual. The article first examines some features of the systems-theoretical framework that are used to describe and analyse the issue of human rights. Next, it presents a brief overview of the semantic evolution of human rights. This reconstruction focuses on the question how the modern semantics of human rights can be linked to a specific structural societal transformation. The second part of the essay is devoted to the social function of human rights. After focusing on the general function, it makes a distinction between ‘fundamental freedoms’ on the one hand, and the ‘rights of equality’ on the other.

The human rights movement has traditionally focused on documenting abuses, rather than attempting to explain them. In recent years, however, the question of the ‘root causes’ of violations has emerged as a key issue in human rights work. The present article examines this new (or newly insistent) discourse of root causes. While valuable, it is shown to have significant limitations. It foreshortens the investigation of causes; it treats effects as though they were causes; and it identifies causes only to put them aside. With these points in mind, the article counterposes an alternative approach in which the orienting concept is not root causes, but ‘planned misery.’

In this paper, I examine the relationship between sociology and the human rights discourse. A major segment of the discourse is between Western and nonwestern scholars joining the debate from a wide variety of disciplines including law, political science, economics, and demography. Sociology has made a poor showing. Perhaps this is due to the more general problem that the discipline, as a whole, lags behind others in applying itself to the human rights debate. Sjoberg and Vaughan argue that sociological theory has hardly been brought to bear on human rights issues. They are worried about “the intellectual myopia of contemporary sociologists regarding human rights”. At first glance, sociology appears to be in a strategic position to grapple with human rights issues given its focus on the maintenance of social order, social change, and the construction of new institutions. All these can be brought to bear on the problem of human rights.

I review the human rights debate from the perspective of an African trained in sociology. I argue that sociological theories have inadvertently influenced the entire debate by setting its parameters. Further, its theories overwhelmingly influenced human rights programs inaugurated in Africa and other Third World regions. A major concern of nonwestern scholars and activists has been the European belief that other regions have little or nothing to add to the understanding of human rights and that, indeed, most did not even have a conception of human rights before being introduced by the West. Thus, according to Donnelly, "most non- Western cultural and political traditions lack, not only the practice of human rights, but the very concept. As a matter of historical fact, the concept of human rights is an artifact of mod- ern Western civilization". I address African perspectives on human rights and link this to the role that sociology has played in shaping the debate between Western and nonwestern scholars. Finally, I examine some of the potential contributions of sociology and compare these to African concerns.

The Olympic Games are increasingly used by non-governmental organizations to demand transnational forms of accountability from public authorities. This article assesses the effectiveness of transnational public opinion surrounding the Beijing 2008 Olympics, when the pressure of Western public opinion was exerted upon the government of the world's most populous non-Western nation to improve its human rights record. Utilizing the concepts of ‘imagined global community’ and ‘transnational public sphere’, it finds that the Olympic Games had helped to call into existence a transnational public that ran up against the obstacle posed by the incomplete formation of supra-national forms of governance. The International Olympic Committee, a non-governmental organization, was a weak substitute. Because of the strong desire of Chinese people to take part in transnational deliberations, the article concludes with optimism about the potential of transnational public spheres that include Chinese people to develop toward more effective forms of transnational governance. But the IOC must strengthen the voice of its non-Western members, and Western interlocutors, including the media, must accept their share of the responsibility for creating the conditions for egalitarian dialogue.

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. A second set of themes focuses on a dominant global policy context related to ungoverned territories, failed and fragile states and state-building – and the need to develop counterinsurgency states. These two sets of themes currently complement each other and their exploration is intended to demonstrate how a broader geosociology can expand our understanding of human rights beyond the often narrow, normative disciplinary frames within which they are commonly situated.

This book explains and critiques the position adopted by the UK Supreme Court on disputes involving human rights, especially those protected by the Human Rights Act 1998. Building upon the fact that the UK Supreme Court, which began operating in 2009, has inherited case law developed over many decades by the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords, the book considers whether the Supreme Court’s current views are internally consistent and externally in line with the standards adopted by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. After three chapters which describe the origins of the Supreme Court and analyse its jurisprudence on the concept of human rights and on the procedural dimensions of the Human Rights Act 1998, the book examines how the Court (and the House of Lords before it) has interpreted the principal Convention rights that are given effect in UK law by the 1998 Act. It finds in relation to almost every right that the top UK court has been unduly cautious and restrained, either because it does not wish to tread on the toes of Parliament or because it is unwilling to go further in protecting human rights than the European Court of Human Rights has already gone. The book pays particular attention to instances in which decisions of the top domestic court have been overturned in Strasbourg and to the occasions on which there has been a prolonged ‘dialogue’ between the two courts over a contentious issue.

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. Two-stage regression analyses that control for the endogeneity of treaty membership show that stronger commitments in the form of optional provisions that allow states and individuals to complain about human rights abuses are often associated with improved practices. The article discusses the scholarly and practical implications of these findings.