Search results

This is a draft of a chapter that has been accepted for publication by Oxford University Press in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies edited by Renée Marlin-Bennett. DOI:10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.371

Cover -- Half-title -- Series information -- Title page -- Copyright information -- Epigraph -- Table of contents -- Preface and acknowledgements -- 1 The social construction of human rights -- What are human rights? -- Human rights are socially constructed -- Social constructions of human rights: the constraints of structures -- Constructions.: cultural politics -- Duty-bearers, responsibility and authority -- Towards a political sociology of human rights -- 2 (A) human rights movement(s) and other organisations -- A global human rights movement? -- Transnational advocacy networks: naming and shaming elites -- International non-governmental organisations -- Grassroots movements for human rights -- Emancipatory movements -- Using law, not depending on it -- Claiming rights effectively -- 3 States of human rights -- What are states? -- Differences of 'stateness' and states -- Juridical state -- Post-colonial states -- Predatory states -- Developmental states -- Transforming states -- 4 The United Nations: not a world state -- Structures of 'sovereign inequalities' -- Standard-setting and monitoring -- From headquarters to the field -- Tragic dilemmas -- 5 Humanising capitalism -- Markets are socially constructed -- International Financial Institutions: co-operation and competition -- Taming transnational corporations -- Protecting rural ways of life -- Human rights beyond neo-liberalism -- 6 Women's rights are human rights -- 'Gender violence' at the UN -- Neo-imperialist feminism? -- Vernacularisation -- The gendered limits of law -- 7 Do migrants have rights? -- Crossing borders: regulation without rights -- (Some) migrants into (post-national) citizens -- United Nations refugee camps: humanitarianism without rights -- The right not to have to migrate? -- 8 What works? Paradoxes in the human rights field -- Measuring human rights.

Taking the contemporary debate about the status of political sociology as a starting point, the article presents some of the alternative views, and discusses the relationships between sociology and political science. It claims that, despite persistent controversies, looking into the research tradition of political sociology is a useful resource to grasp the identity of the sub-discipline. Accordingly, the author takes the relationship between state and society as the central issue that everywhere cuts across theoretical and methodological diversity. Finally, the text takes the nation-state as the most typical configuration of the relationship between state and society in modern history, and one that remains so in the present, despite the many historical and analytical challenges we observe today.