SOCI 857: Sociology of Human Rights

SOCI 857-001: Sociology of Human Rights
(Spring 2014)

04:30 PM to 07:10 PM R

Section Information for Spring 2014

[a.k.a, “Lo-Jacking Global Justice: Bringing Perspectives from the Global South Back into the Development of Human Rights”]

The Sociology of Human Rights only recently has emerged as a formal sub-field within the discipline. Although most classical sociological theory (e.g., Marx, Weber, Durkheim) casts a cynical light on human rights, contemporary sociologists have contributed significantly to their development and to our empirical understanding of their practice. In 2008, the American Sociological Association created a new Section on Human Rights, and the International Sociological Association has an active Thematic Research Group on Human Rights.  But what are human rights? Where do they come from?  And how do we study them? Are there other important values aside from human rights (for example, “national security,” “national sovereignty,” “good governance” or “economically sustainable growth”), and if so, how are human rights related to them?  In other words, what are the limits and well as the value of human rights? Understanding human rights requires conceptual analysis, moral judgment, and social scientific knowledge. The concept of human rights is an interdisciplinary concept.

Law and philosophy have provided the dominant approaches to understanding human rights -- essentially focusing on legal and political institutional forces emanating downward from decision-making processes at the international level, or on philosophical and normative concepts of what human rights ought to be. The social sciences, however, offer an additional approach that explores the empirical practice of human rights (including the discursive practices of human rights).  This approach pays greater attention to the contexts of meaning within which human rights are invoked and practiced. It also gives greater attention to the role that non-state actors play in shaping the development and institutionalization of human rights, and to “bottom-up,” not just “top-down,” processes that promote and localize human rights consciousness.  From this perspective, human rights are not only law, international norms, values, or ideology -- they are also a social movement.  But contemporary social theory has not simply posited human rights as socially constructed, it has also offered competing ontological explanations for what makes human rights particularly “human,” eschewing natural rights notions of law and human dignity in favor of more sociological conceptions of law and human vulnerability. Furthermore, there are several new directions in the sociology of human rights that represent a critical theoretical approach to understanding human rights and global justice -- one that seeks to promote more democratic and cosmopolitan practices in the production of human rights and global justice.  These approaches have given greater attention to the way that transnational networks linking social actors in the global North and the global South are socially organized  -- typically through unequal relations of power, authority, class, and status.  They also have begun to identify alternative practices for organizing the meaningful production of human rights that offer great hope to advocates of social change and global justice.

In other words, the human rights movement itself serves as a contested site of competing visions of globalization. Increasingly, scholars approach the study of human rights practice from a variety of disciplinary traditions, but we have gleaned from each other important insights and appreciation for new lines of questioning that mutually enhance our work – even if we do not always agree with each other’s conclusions. This kind interdisciplinary approach to human rights also raised a number of sociologically significant questions: Do understandings of justice in the Global South meaningfully shape those institutionalized as human rights, or do human rights in the name of “global justice” flow only from the North to the South?  Does the social organization upon which transnational solidarity links actors across communities of the Global North and South reflect the human rights values that they pursue?  What is the quality of the social relationships upon which such solidarities are formed?  To what extent is the creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship of NGOs “measured” and constrained by the performative expectations of philanthropic donors and impact investment brokerages that provide the resources for their human rights work?  How do our understandings of human agency and personhood shape the (re)production and (trans)formation of human rights?

Aside from providing a survey of sociological theory on human rights, this course examines connections between inequality, conflict, social justice, governance, and human rights in an age of globalization.  At the start of the twenty-first century, inequality is becoming an urgent issue of global politics and governance.  Drawing upon case studies from around the world, we examine institutional and structural violence and inequality as it relates to state, corporate, and military power; uneven relations of power within civil society; international law and order; wellbeing and social policy; global justice; regionalism, multilateralism, and transnationalism; environmental protection; gender inequality; ethnic conflict; resource wars; and national security policy (before and after World War II, the Cold War, and September 11,2001). 

Throughout the course, we will focus on the implications of these issues for the ongoing development of human rights.  After explaining how the concept of human rights has a contested history marked by philosophical controversies, and how understanding those controversies within an interdisciplinary framework helps us to illuminate the state of human rights today, we track the development of a liberal and secular perspective on human rights during the Enlightenment, a socialist perspective on human rights during the Industrial Age, and the institutionalization of human rights and the right of cultural self-determination following the two world wars. We also survey various approaches to understanding human rights and global justice (giving special attention to contemporary sociological approaches), and highlight their many unresolved tensions to explain why the practice, and not just the theory, of human rights matters.  We then discuss the role of the social sciences in understanding human rights, and explain why we cannot reduce human rights to legal analysis. We also discuss the relationship between culture and human rights – including the problems of cultural imperialism and cultural relativism, and the relationship between human rights and minority rights, the rights of indigenous people, women’s rights and the right to self-determination. Another important area of focus in this course is the politics of human rights, and the influence of human rights on politics.  We examine not only nation-state centered paradigms but also those that give greater attention to transnational networks of actors, including social movements, NGOs, corporations, and state actors themselves.  We also examine the rise of corporate rights from legal personhood (starting in the second-half of the nineteenth century) to the contemporary human rights that courts have determined corporations possess. Ultimately, we attempt to assess how globalization and development is impacting human rights today, and the power (if any) that human rights have to shape the unfolding process of globalization and the institutions sustaining it.

Course Goals and Expected Learning Outcomes

ŸStudents will survey and learn to distinguish a wide-variety of perspectives on the nature, origin, development, and purpose of human rights, and what is at stake in debates over these perspectives.

ŸStudents will comprehend several contemporary and competing empirical approaches to understanding human rights, and gain exposure to diverse methods employed by researchers who pursue these approaches.

ŸStudents will learn how to analyze patterns of structural inequality and violence in contexts of local, national, and transnational relations and practice, and how human rights have empirically impacted such contexts.

ŸRegardless of their political or philosophical perspective on human rights, students will learn how the practices of institutionalizing human rights affect their lives – for better and/or worse.

ŸStudents will learn how to research and analyze the networks of relations and practices comprising a contemporary human rights campaign.

ŸStudents will learn how to think and write critically about their own understandings and practices of justice.

Course Information from the University Catalog