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In popular, scholarly, and legal discourse, psychological trauma is an experience that belongs to victims. While we expect victims of crimes to suffer trauma, we never ask whether perpetrators likewise experience those same crimes as trauma. Indeed, if we consider trauma in the perpetration of a crime at all, it is usually to inquire whether a terrible experience earlier in life drove a person toward wrongdoing. We are loath to acknowledge that the commission of the crime itself may cause some perpetrators to experience their own psychological injury and scarring.

This article aims to fill this gap in our understanding of crime and trauma by initiating a long-overdue conversation about perpetrator trauma. Specifically, this article argues that perpetrator trauma exists and merits attention. In doing so, it traces a cultural evolution in the concept of trauma from a psychological category to a moral one, and in response, it proposes a counternarrative of trauma—one that recognizes trauma as a neutral, human trait, divorced from morality, and not incompatible with choice and agency.

Finally, this article argues that we ignore this counternarrative of trauma at our peril. Acknowledging the reality of perpetrator trauma can improve reconciliation efforts in the aftermath of mass atrocity by exposing the need to rehabilitate perpetrators. As importantly, recognizing perpetrator trauma erodes the all-too-common perception of perpetrators as cartoonish monsters by exposing their ordinariness and humanity. The point is not to generate sympathy for a génocidaire. But recognizing him as a person who chose to kill, and who now suffers because of it, can illuminate both the roots of his crimes and the real horror undergirding them—that perpetrators are merely people, and that any other person could do the same. In exposing these overlooked aspects of crime, this article unsettles understandings of suffering and violence, challenges the categories of perpetrator and victim, and makes clear that the question of how to respond to mass atrocity is even more complex than we know.

How can we think about people and cultures unlike our own? In the early modern period, the fact of human diversity presented Europeans with little cause for anxiety: they simply assumed the superiority of the West. During the 18th century this view was gradually abandoned, as thinkers argued that other peoples possessed reason and sensibility, and thus deserved the same respect that Westerners accorded themselves. Since that time, however, Enlightenment belief in the universalities of human nature has fallen into disrepute; critics allege that such notions have had disastrous consequences in the 20th century, ranging from prejudice to persecution and outright genocide.

This article defends the claim that human rights is a legitimate subject of inquiry for sociologists, and proceeds to present the case for a particular application of sociological theory to the understanding of gross human rights violations. Sociology, it claims, is equipped to study the dynamics of social institutions – socially constructed language-structures within which social action is framed – and since the mid-20th century, human rights has become such an institution. The article advocates an intellectual project for the sociology of rights, drawing on a diverse range of sources, that recognises how human rights abuses are made possible when the very concept of the ‘human’ is subtly redefined through these language-structures.

By the end of the eighteenth century, politicians in America and France were invoking the natural rights of man to wrest sovereignty away from kings and lay down universal basic entitlements. Exactly how and when did “rights” come to justify such measures? In On the Spirit of Rights, Dan Edelstein answers this question by examining the complex genealogy of the rights that regimes enshrined in the American and French Revolutions. With a lively attention to detail, he surveys a sprawling series of debates among rulers, jurists, philosophers, political reformers, writers, and others who were all engaged in laying the groundwork for our contemporary systems of constitutional governance. Every seemingly new claim about rights turns out to be a variation on a theme, as late medieval notions were subtly repeated and refined to yield the talk of “rights” we recognize today. From the Wars of Religion to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, On the Spirit of Rights is a sweeping tour through centuries of European intellectual history and an essential guide to our ways of thinking about human rights today.

Macrolevel theories of social movement emergence posit that political opportunity “opens the door” for collective action. This article uses the case of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising to show that collective action need not always require opportunity. Warsaw Jews’ armed resistance was a response not to opportunity but to a lack thereof. Equally important was a strong sense of honor among the ghetto fighters: the hopelessness of their situation helped construct a motivational frame that equated resistance with honor and made collective resistance possible. This case therefore illustrates how framing processes can mediate structural conditions to produce collective action in the absence of opportunity. It also points to the need for additional research on protest and resistance in nondemocratic settings.

Although the study of citizenship has been an important development in contemporary sociology, the nature of rights has been largely ignored. The analysis of human rights presents a problem for sociology, in which cultural relativism and the fact-value distinction have largely destroyed the classical tradition of the natural-law basis for rights discourse. This critique of the idea of universal rights was prominent in the work of Marx, Durkheim and Weber. However, recent developments in the organisation of nation states, the globalisation of political issues, the transformation of family life, and changes in medical technology in relation to human reproduction have brought the question of human rights to the forefront of social and political debate. The paper argues that a sociology of rights is important, because there are obvious limitations to the idea of citizenship, which is based on membership of a nation state. Existing conceptualisations of citizenship require the supplement of rights theory. It is argued that sociology can ground the analysis of human rights in a concept of human frailty, especially the vulnerability of the body, in the idea of the precariousness of social institutions, and in a theory of moral sympathy. These three analytical supports - ontological frailty, social precariousness, and moral sympathy - are partly derived from the philosophical anthropology of Arnold Gehlen, from Ulrich Beck's concept of the risk society, and Max Scheler's phenomenology of sympathy. Emodied frailty is a human universal condition, which is compounded by the risky and precarious nature of social institutions. Human vulnerability can be contained or ameliorated by the institution of rights which protect human beings from this ontological uncertainty. From a sociological perspective, rights are social claims for institutionalised protection. However, it is because of collective sympathy for the plight of others that moral communities are created which support the institution of rights. This thesis not only offers a sociological version of traditional notions of natural or inalienable rights, but also attempts to provide a sociological alternative to enlightenment theories of social contract and individual rights.

This foundational text now features a new introduction by Rashid Khalidi reflecting on the significance of his work over the past decade and its relationship to the struggle for Palestinian nationhood. Khalidi also casts an eye to the future, noting the strength of Palestinian identity and social solidarity yet wondering whether current trends will lead to Palestinian statehood and independence.

The release of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on C.I.A. interrogation tactics added a new chapter to the national conversation on the government's use of torture.

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.

The tension between public health and individual rights raises key questions in the face of public health crises such as tuberculosis (TB) and Ebola: What are the circumstances that warrant the obligatory detention of individuals with an infectious disease as a measure of protecting the general public? What are the implications for the protection of privacy while managing and controlling the spread of diseases such as HIV? What must be done to obtain informed consent for research and epidemiological studies that benefit public health? Recent handling of TB and Ebola patients in West Africa captures the tensions inherent in the attempt to balance public health and individual rights. In this Perspective, we outline our experiences in handling Petition 329 of 2014, a constitutional petition filed in the High Court of Kenya in 2010, which sought to challenge the arrest and detention of two TB patients for interrupting their TB treatment.