Virtual Library

This article combines health and water research results, evidence from confidential documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, legal analysis, and discussion of historical context to demonstrate that actions taken by the international community through the Inter-American Development Bank are directly related to a lack of access to clean water in Haiti. The article demonstrates that these actions constitute a clear violation of Haitians’ right to water under both domestic and international law. The article exposes the United States government’s role in blocking the disbursal of millions of dollars in international bank loans that would have had life-saving consequences for the Haitian people. The loans were derailed in 2001 by politically-motivated interventions on behalf of the US and other members of the international community in direct violation of the Inter-American Development Bank charter. To demonstrate the impact of these interventions, the article presents data gathered in a study that employed human rights and public health methodologies to assess the right to water in Haiti. The data reveal that Haitians experience obstacles concerning every aspect of the right to water: difficulties with water availability, limited physical and economic accessibility, and poor water quality. The article provides a framework of concrete duties and obligations that should be followed by all actors involved in Haiti in order to realize Haitians’ human right to water. In response to the undeniable link between the international community’s political interference and the intolerably poor state of potable water in Haiti, the article concludes with a recommendation that all actors in Haiti follow a rights-based approach to the development and implementation of water projects in Haiti.

While transitions to democracy have been hailed as the most important phenomena of this century, few scholars understand the role that women have played in these metamorphoses. This article uses an historical in-depth case study to examine how and why women mobilized against the state in Chile. Previous social movement theories have not attended adequately to cultural and ideational elements (e.g., gender ideology), much less these factors in the Third World and authoritarian context. In contrast, the present study modifies and extends the concepts of political opportunity structure and collective action frames, suggesting that the manner in which ideology and cultural themes are framed may provide opportunities for protest, especially in the authoritarian context. Specifically, the rise and fall of broader mobilizational frames or master frames shapes how movement-specific frames compete, decay, and transform, as some master frames create space for certain ideas (e.g., feminism) while others do not. New hypotheses regarding the use of collective action frames in a nondemocratic setting are offered.

A recent movement has extended previous emphases on the rights of national citizens by asserting the global human rights of all persons. This article describes the extent to which this change is reflected in the language of national constitutions around the world. Human rights language – formerly absent from almost all constitutions – now appears in most of them. Rather than characterizing developed or democratic states, human rights language is, first, especially common in countries most susceptible to global influences. Second, human rights language is driven by the extent of the international human rights regime at the time of a constitution’s writing. Third, human rights language tends to appear in newer constitutions and in the constitutions of emergent and reorganized states. National constitutions are imprinted with global social conditions, which now stress the discourse of human rights.

Considerable sociological work shows that the human rights regime is rapidly expanding through isomorphic processes. We provide new insight into human rights diffusion through an analysis of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR), a global forum in which all states receive human rights recommendations from their peers. We convert the roughly 50,000 recommendations from the first two cycles of the UPR into a relational dataset of states making and receiving recommendations, inductively modeling this process of human rights diffusion through latent class regression. Building on research in the new institutionalism, we find that asymmetric relationships between states make it less likely for human rights recommendations to be accepted, with accepted recommendations tending to be more general and easier to implement. We argue that these partnership patterns provide evidence for normative corridors that give world society its shape. By drawing together world society approaches with relational sociology, we develop new insights into the structuration of human rights and normative change more broadly.

Between 1945 and 2005, nation-states around the world revised their criminal laws on sexual activities. This global reform wave—across countries and domains of sexual activity—followed from the reconstitution of world models of society around individuals rather than corporate bodies. During the post-World War II period, this process rearranged the global cultural and organizational underpinnings of sex, eroding world-level support for criminal laws aimed at protecting collective entities—especially the family and the nation—and strengthening world support for laws aimed at protecting individualized persons. To make our case, we use unique cross-national and longitudinal data on the criminal regulation of rape, adultery, sodomy, and child sexual abuse. The data reveal striking counter-directional trends in sex-law reforms, which simultaneously elaborated regulations protecting individuals and dissolved laws protecting collective entities. World-level negative-binomial regression analyses and country-level event-history analyses confirm our main propositions. The findings demonstrate a sweeping revolution in criminal-sex laws, rooted in the intensified global celebration of free-standing personhood.

Most cases are not life-threatening, which is also what makes the virus a historic challenge to contain.

Scholars have documented the emergence of apparently race-neutral discourses that serve to entrench racial stratification following the elimination of de jure segregation. These discourses deny the existence of both present-day racism and the contemporary effects of histories of racial oppression. Researchers posit that individuals are socialized into these views, but little empirical attention has been paid to the processes through which such socialization occurs. Focusing on the South African case study, I draw on five months of daily observations in seventeen 9th-grade history classrooms, content analysis of notes distributed in class, and 170 in-depth interviews with teachers and students to document how and why students are taught not to attend to the effects of apartheid on their society. To mitigate race-based conflict in their local school context, teachers told “both sides of the story,” highlighting that not all whites were perpetrators and not all blacks were victims. By decoupling the racialized coding of victims and perpetrators, and sidelining discussions of beneficiaries, teachers hindered students’ abilities to make connections to the present. In outlining how and why individuals are taught about the irrelevance of the past, this study contributes to literatures on race, education, collective memory, and transition to democracy.

Collective action scholars have long examined why people choose to participate in social movements. This article argues that this body of scholarship can be productively applied to understanding rescue efforts during genocide, which have typically been associated with altruism and other psychological explanations. We analyze the case of Rwanda, where people worked collectively to save Tutsi from the violence that swept across the country in 1994, and ask: What social factors shaped Rwandans’ decisions and abilities to save persecuted individuals? To address this question, we draw upon 35 in-depth interviews and a survey of 273 individuals who participated in rescue efforts, which constitutes one of the largest samples of rescue efforts to date. Although much previous literature has emphasized the role of stable personality traits in influencing such high-risk decisions, conceptualizing rescue as dynamic collective action enables us to examine social and contextual factors. Specifically, we illustrate how biographical availability, socialization, and situational contexts may influence rescue efforts. These findings contribute to scholarship on high-risk, clandestine collective action by illuminating how a combination of factors, including biographical availability, socialization, and situational contexts, coalesce to make rescue possible. As such, these findings inform our understanding of collective action that resulted in thousands of individuals being spared from torture, sexualized violence, and death

Drawing on data from Senegal, this article develops the concept of pockets of world society to explain how adherence to a liberal vision of gay rights emerges within an otherwise illiberal legal landscape. Pockets of world society appear at the site where the global field of human rights penetrates the national juridical field. Senegal’s Ministry of Justice sits at this juncture. It is a member of both fields but tends toward a logic of international imitation. The ministry accommodates world society’s stance on homosexuality, offering a moderate re-interpretation of its nation’s criminalization, and quietly circumventing local law to enact global scripts of sexual actorhood. In stark contrast, Senegalese courts, located solely within the national juridical field, adhere to a logic of popular representation, rejecting sexual self-determination, insisting on national sovereignty, and carrying out the nation’s criminalization of homosexuality in accordance with both law and collective will. These conflicting logics are driven by external pressures, field membership and position, professional trajectories, and sources of legal legitimacy and social accountability. Finally, I contend that the conflict in Senegal spotlights not only world society’s limits, but its persistent strength and its ability to disrupt the coherence of the law.

12 Million Black Voices, first published in 1941, combines Wright's prose with startling photographs selected by Edwin Rosskam from the Security Farm Administration files compiled during the Great Depression. The photographs include works by such giants as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Arthur Rothstein. From crowded, rundown farm shacks to Harlem storefront churches, the photos depict the lives of black people in 1930s America--their misery and weariness under rural poverty, their spiritual strength, and their lives in northern ghettos. Wright's accompanying text eloquently narrates the story of these 90 pictures and delivers a powerful commentary on the origins and history of black oppression in this country.