Editorial Foreword

Human Rights and Sociology

When the Universal Declaration was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly it was presented as a response to hopes for ‘the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want … as the highest aspiration of the common people’ (Preamble). Those framing the Declaration sought to establish that states and those that govern them could no longer expect impunity but could be held to account against internationally agreed human rights standards for the treatment of the people within their borders. By proposing that people have moral rights to civil, political, social, economic and cultural protections, which should also become legal rights through regional conventions, they also explicitly placed a duty on states to respect, protect and fulfil those obligations.

Claims that all such rights are fundamental and indivisible stretch credulity in the sociological context; for example, can any sociologist of families conscious of patriarchy, adoption and communal childraising agree that ‘The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society’ (UDHR, Article 16, part 3)? Yet whether or not human rights are all accepted, the study of human rights has much to offer for the renewal of sociology. The most significant yet most underestimated feature of the sociology of human rights is its potential to contribute to the critical study of power and inequality in societies – surely among the central purposes of sociological research.

Impunity, denial and neglect remain central characteristics within the struggle to realise human rights in practice, with a gulf between human rights ideals and lived experiences continuing across the world. Since the signing of the UDHR, however, the scope of human rights associated with the UN system has gradually been expanded in terms of breadth, depth and penetration. In terms of breadth, there are now nine core international human rights instruments protecting specific types of rights as well as particular groups such as indigenous peoples, migrants, children and people with disabilities. With respect to depth, human rights norms are now increasingly developed and applied at international, regional, national and sub-national levels, notwithstanding major counter-examples such as China. Simultaneously, the penetration of human rights considerations is revealed in their mainstreaming into areas of international relations and national politics and policy, including international peace, conflict resolution, humanitarian aid and anti-discrimination ‘equality’ policies in Europe. Whilst the state was the original focus of human rights protection, in what has been hailed as an ‘age of rights’ (Baxi, 2000; Bobbio, 1996), human rights norms are now also invoked as means to hold to account non-state actors such as multi-national corporations or paramilitary groups. Human rights as a concept is most frequently utilised by the powerless, though also by the powerful.

The context in which human rights were intended to be invoked, whether as law or as social norms, was in response to oppression and violence, exclusion and discrimination. It may thus fairly be argued that the study of human rights conflicts and practices draws our attention to the effects of abuses of power, as well as often illuminating the origins of illegitimate power and practices of resistance. Hence research on human rights issues draws our attention to global power relations, as shown in Bhatt’s article on the wars and conflicts occurring in Afghanistan and the Middle East where the United States and United Kingdom military forces have been central participants. The sociology of human rights takes rights contestations as a central focus of study, and in doing so illuminates the negative extremes of social experience – and the gulf between human rights ideals and lived experiences – bringing these into the heart of sociological debate, as articles selected for this collection illustrate.

A sociology of human rights has been developing in fragmentary ways since the beginnings of sociology itself. Following the emergence of notions of human rights in Enlightenment thought and examples of their expression such as the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (National Assembly, 1789), Marx’s comments in On the Jewish Question during the mid-19th century provided a critique of such rights discourse, in which he explicitly criticised the ‘right to property’ in that Declaration as part of the ideological architecture of capitalism (Marx, 1844). As Woodiwiss has noted, both Durkheim and Weber gave some brief attention to issues of rights, although Turner’s earlier claim that both tended to sidestep rights as a normative issue beyond the scope of sociology also maintains credibility as a general characterisation (Hynes et al., 2010: 814; Turner, 1993; Woodiwiss, 1990). Several authors in this volume suggest that a sociology of rights is now firmly emerging which must engage with such normative concerns and inherent complexities.

With the emergence of the post-1948 human rights regime marking a new universalism of rights discourse it is surprising that so little sociological attention to human rights existed for most of the second half of the 20th century, despite the study of citizenship rights (Marshall, 1950). However, there have been significant exceptions. From the late 1980s and early 1990s it was individual figures such as Anthony Woodiwiss and Bryan Turner who, two decades ago, began to forge the contemporary sociology of rights. In his groundbreaking article ‘Outline of a Theory Of Human Rights’ in Sociology, Turner distinctively argued that a sociology of human rights could take as a starting point the social experience of embodied human frailty, and hence sympathy derived from this yielded a new foundation for universal human rights (1993). However, this tended to reproduce a rather static and absolutist conception of human rights. By contrast, Anthony Woodiwiss (1990) and Malcolm Waters (1996) – responding to Turner in Sociology – tended to emphasise the social construction of human rights, although also offering qualified defences. Meanwhile sociologists such as Michael Banton (1996), Diane Elson (2006) and Sylvia Walby (2012), amongst others, have made significant contributions to the global institutional development of human rights through their work on various international human rights bodies, demonstrating sociologists’ commitment to translating theory into practice. Hilhorst, in this special issue, similarly positions the study of rights in a sociology of praxis. Judith Blau in the USA and the organisation Sociologists Without Borders International (2012) have pursued sociological activism, working from a human rights foundation (Blau and Moncada, 2005).

Anthropology has been ahead of sociology in developing empirical research on the reception, interpretation and effects of human rights in local contexts. Social anthropologist Richard Wilson (2006) has argued for a move beyond attempts like Turner’s to foreclose the ontological status of human rights, to investigate the ‘social life of rights’. Stimulated by this, Morris (2006) argued that a sociological contribution should be developed through a ‘theory of practice’ rather than a search for foundations. The recent volume Sociology and Human Rights: New Engagements continued this momentum forward and our introductory essay for that volume provided a preliminary mapping of the field (Hynes et al., 2010, 2011).

This special issue on The Sociology of Human Rights, edited by the Conveners of the British Sociological Association’s Study Group on the Sociology of Rights, ¹ is therefore a contribution to a long-developing field in which there has been much significant work since the early 1990s. The distinctive contribution of this special issue therefore is to take forward the development of the sociology of human rights in two ways. First, it takes the field from being developed in the thought of discreet individual theorists to becoming a more collective and institutionalised project, a process paralleled for example by our development of a stream on ‘Law, Crime and Rights’ ² with a ‘Sociology of Rights’ sub-stream at the annual British Sociological Association conference; by other conferences organised through the Study Group; and by development of the Study Group’s website on which all concerned with sociology and human rights are invited to post information and participate (Sociology of Rights Study Group, 2012). Second, it assists in a process of mainstreaming the sociology of human rights into the heart of sociology; for despite exceptions such as Turner’s widely known article (1993), research on human rights has not tended to be published in the core sociology journals. Even so, growing interest in this field has been demonstrated in terms of submissions for this special issue – 83 were received – making the call for papers the most successful, we are told, in Sociology’s recent history. This enormous appetite for the further development of the sociology of human rights field demands engagements and promises a fruitful future.

We present the articles here as exemplifying the growing strength and diversity of analyses in the sociology of human rights, characteristically moving away from a static and foundational view towards a more dynamic and critical analysis of the contested linguistic, normative and geopolitical content and parameters of human rights discourse and practices. The articles range from theoretically focused articles such as Baghai on ‘Privacy as a Human Right’, using the autopoietic theory of Luhmann, and O’Byrne’s use of language-structures to defend a distinctly sociological contribution to human rights research, to more empirically original works. The latter include that by Kennedy and Riga, analysing changes to US policy on Bosnia and Herzegovina through detailed analysis of recently released US State Department documents and interviews. However, all these articles and others in the collection draw to varying degrees on both empirical research and social theory, also often reflecting on the relationship of social theory to normative and philosophical issues.

The articles demonstrate the highly international character of research in the sociology of human rights. Several, such as Claeys’ study of Via Campesina as a food sovereignty movement, show a growing sophistication in analysis of transnational social movements; some examine contestation of transnational law and governance, such as Kennedy and Riga on US policy in Bosnia and Herzegovina; others show growing depth of international comparative research, such as Morrow and Pells’ focus on children’s rights and child poverty in Ethiopia and India, and Nash on the Mexican Zapatistas, Canadian indigenous peoples and the work of the Columbian Constitutional Court.

For this special issue we sought to commission contributions globally that pushed the field forward empirically and theoretically. We circulated our call for papers to global, regional and national email lists, and received submissions from around the world. It is a matter of regret to us that this volume does not include more contributions from authors based outside European academic circles where we are aware of a considerable contributions being made to advance sociological research on human rights. This probably reflects less familiarity with the journal, less institutionalised sociology and the effects of the English language medium in many contexts, along with the limits of our own knowledge and other factors. However, we feel the special issue’s global representation of subjects and societies conveys the international nature of sociological interest in human rights, which can only enhance the relevance of sociology for new generations of researchers who are shifting their focus towards analysis of so-called North/South power relationships. Such further analysis of global inequalities allows conceptualisation beyond nationally bounded conceptions, and the tyranny of thinking nationally, for which our tools for enquiry require spatial expansion. Articles by Claeys, Nash, Hilhorst, Moon, Morrow and Pells, and Bhatt all focus on relationships between ‘North’ and ‘South’, and implicitly for Bhatt and Woodiwiss also ‘West’ and ‘East’ (however problematic these concepts), in ways which seek to systematically revise conceptual frameworks and generate knowledge in a manner better attuned to the new global experiences and realities in which the wealthiest societies should no longer assume dominance, in accordance with recent calls for such reorientations from theorists such as Connell (2007) and Santos (2007).

Introducing the Articles

The articles in the special issue, outlined in turn below, are presented in a sequence designed to enable readers new to the sociology of human rights to enter the field and become orientated to its main lines of theoretical analysis and critical debate. The three opening articles particularly have been positioned with this aim in mind, sharing a concern to analyse global power configurations. For our expository purpose these three can be characterised in turn as highlighting three crucial analytical issues: first, the relationship of human rights law to social movements claiming rights, and hence whether we conceptualise human rights as developing ‘from above’ or ‘from below’ (Nash); second, the need for a critical questioning of the geopolitical focus and scope of application of human rights discourse (Bhatt); and third, the need to problematise the relationship between the normative content and the language of human rights (O’Byrne). The following articles can be read as proceeding with investigation of these general themes in various ways.

We commence with Kate Nash’s article ‘Human Rights, Movements and Law: On Not Researching Legitimacy’. Nash’s opening discussion helpfully foregrounds that sociology, crucially, must avoid normative assumptions that human rights as moral norms always coincide with human rights law. She introduces the central analytical issue of how human rights should be conceived in relation to global power formations; hence the focus is on how human rights relate to power relations between the North and the South (via engagement with Santos), whether human rights emerge ‘from above’ or ‘from below’, and on their relation to a multiplicity of legal systems, movements and transnational advocacy networks (via engagement with social movement theories). Nash takes the Mexican Zapatistas as exemplifying a movement ‘from below’, arguing that it is both an ‘excellent example of subaltern cosmopolitanism’ but may also be a ‘limit case’ of that perspective. She then presents an alternative case in which international law was called upon to adjudicate on internal disputes between community and individual rights (Lovelace vs Canada), as well as a case where the Columbian Constitutional Court decided for local communities against international law on the basis that definitions of human rights are contextual. Nash concludes by calling for methodologies and theories that enable the analysis of organisational diversity and legal complexity so as to address the state’s mediating role and avoid making assumptions about the legitimacy of international human rights law.

Chetan Bhatt’s article ‘Human Rights and the Transformations of War’ raises the need to interrogate the geopolitical scope and focus of human rights discourse, and demonstrates the contribution the sociology of human rights can make to contemporary critical and radical scholarship engaged with global power struggles including the so-called ‘War on Terror’. The call for papers for the special issue sought contributions addressing ‘the sociology of human rights in the shadow of war and conflict’, and Bhatt’s article illustrates the capacity of sociology to rise to this challenge. The article shows how human rights are selectively invoked and utilised in contemporary wars and ways in which the sociology of human rights can assist the development of what he calls a ‘geosociology’, to address policies on ungoverned territories and state-building. The article shows that far from being a narrowly idealist field, the contemporary sociology of human rights is being extended to engage with, and contribute to, radical political analyses and critiques of western military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and other states – with Iran the current focus of concern.

Darren O’Byrne’s contribution is entitled ‘On the Sociology of Human Rights: Theorising the Language-Structure of Rights’. His article begins with a staunch defence of the importance of sociological analysis to the study of human rights, but its central theoretical argument is for distinguishing the normative content of human rights from human rights as a language-structure, identifying the latter for sociological research. He then presents the case for a particular application of this sociological theory to the understanding of gross human rights violations. Echoing Turner (1993), O’Byrne argues that the discipline of sociology is particularly well equipped to analyse the dynamics of social institutions, which he defines as ‘socially constructed language-structures within which social action is framed’, and human rights should now be considered to be a social institution. O’Byrne’s distinctive contribution is to argue for an ‘intellectual project for the sociology of rights’, which examines how human rights abuses are enabled when the ‘human’ is subtly redefined through certain language-structures.

Priscilla Claeys’ article is ‘The Creation of New Rights by the Food Sovereignty Movement: The Challenge of Institutionalizing Subversion’, and follows well from O’Byrne’s analysis by exemplifying the contestation of the language of rights, while also echoing Nash’s discussion of rights movements from below. This article focuses on a transnational agrarian movement, Via Campesina, a ‘food sovereignty movement’ combining national and sub-national peasant movements which has developed since the early 1990s in states including Brazil, India, Senegal and France. Claeys examines how, rather than claiming existing rights through law, the movement has acted creatively to articulate new rights. The article is thus valuable as a case study illustrating that the sociology of rights should not assume a top down model in which rights defined in existing global human rights declarations, covenants and law are claimed by movements; but rather that collective social movements may invent and define new ideas of rights.

Another article illustrating the value of O’Byrne’s focus on the shifting language-structure of rights is by Kennedy and Riga, ‘“Putting Cruelty First”: Interpreting War Crimes as Human Rights Atrocities in US Policy in Bosnia and Herzegovina’. Several sociologists of human rights have called for greater engagement with the role of agency (Hynes et al., 2010; Turner 2002), and Kennedy and Riga’s article responds to this call, arguing for a sociology of human rights that appreciates the social location in which individual actors are embedded as providing a specific articulation, interpretation and actualisation of human rights in practice. The empirical evidence for their arguments lies in the experiences of a relatively small group of political elites and lawyers advising on US policy for ending the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the mid-1990s. Utilising political theorist Judith Shklar’s framework of ‘putting the prevention of cruelty first’, they demonstrate how these individuals’ background experience, normative commitment to human rights and particular interpretation of political violence in Bosnia led to the US-led approach that was political in its selective focus on ‘hard human rights’, perpetrators and state-led atrocities, rather than framed around victim’s rights, vulnerability or dignity. In Nash’s terms this suggests change ‘from above’ rather than ‘from below’. Kennedy and Riga draw on interviews, US State Department reports and, crucially, US State Department archival documents released under the US Freedom of Information Act, providing a rich seam of data that would otherwise be lost.

Claire Moon’s article is ‘What One Sees and How One Files Seeing: Human Rights Reporting, Representation and Action’; it examines the legal, statistical and testimonial forms through which violence and atrocity are expressed, deepening discussion of language and other significations. Moon argues that such an analysis aids our understanding of the relationship between the ‘world view’ of human rights organisations and the ‘styles of thought’ that shape and inform their representations. Moon considers what the dominant discursive forms of human rights, and human rights advocacy, express and repress and the ways in which these forms of representation both facilitate and inhibit action.

Dorothea Hilhorst’s contribution is ‘Constructing Rights and Wrongs in Humanitarian Action: Contributions from a Sociology of Praxis’. Drawing on research into humanitarian aid, refugee care and protracted refugee situations, Hilhorst offers a wide-ranging global discussion, exploring how humanitarian agencies legitimise their presence and programmes by evoking differing normative frameworks. The focus on humanitarian agencies, which Duffield identifies as the ‘borderlands’ of western domination, takes the reader to South Sudan, Kenya and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The analysis which emerges echoes Nash’s emphasis on legal pluralism. Following examination of the adoption of human rights languages by humanitarian actors and everyday encounters between the patrons and clients of humanitarian aid, Hilhorst argues that agencies must take greater account of the unintended consequences of using rights language.

The contribution from Virginia Morrow and Kirrily Pells is ‘Integrating Children’s Human Rights and Child Poverty Debates: Examples from Young Lives in Ethiopia and India’. Drawing on Young Lives longitudinal research conducted over 15 years in four countries of the global ‘South’, the two national case studies begin to demonstrate the complexities and contestations involved in understanding issues in differing contexts. In relation to Ethiopia, the locus, construction and dominance of ‘vulnerability’ for orphaned children are presented. In relation to India, analysing child labour illustrates how idealised, normative views of ‘childhood’ may be misguided. Both case studies show how a sociological approach is able to illuminate structural processes and explain the difficulties of realising rights in practice.

Alice Mah and Noel Whiteside’s article is ‘Human Rights and Ethical Reasoning: Capabilities, Conventions and Spheres of Public Action’; this engages with the capabilities approach of development theorist Amartya Sen – a crucial reference point in contemporary human rights debates. The article thus brings sociology into an interdisciplinary dialogue with development studies and philosophy. It begins by explaining Sen’s view that human rights are founded on the promotion of human capabilities, then draws this together with French convention theory to explore how different societies understand capabilities in different ways. Importantly, Sen’s points relating to the implementation of human rights reaching beyond legislation to include action and advocacy sit well with the role for the sociology of human rights outlined earlier.

Robert Clucas, like Mah and Whiteside, demonstrates the relevance of the sociology of human rights in European and UK contexts, providing an account of ‘Religion, Sexual Orientation and the Equality Act 2010: Gay Bishops in the Church of England Negotiating Rights against Discrimination’. Clucas’ article draws our attention to the central place of the European Convention on Human Rights (Council of Europe, 1950) in social, legal and policy debates in Europe. In the UK context, Clucas demonstrates how the legal codification of human rights through the Human Rights Act (1998) and the Equality Act (2010) has not served to simply dissipate profound disputes over sexuality and faith. Rather, new conflicts have emerged as different groups have taken up rights discourses, leading to tensions between religious rights claims and those of lesbian, gay and bisexual people. Clucas’ study provides an excellent case study of these tensions being played out, focusing on the Church of England and its attempts to operationalise and come to terms with the new legal and policy context. But Clucas reveals the heterosexual frameworks, heteronormative discrimination and exclusionary processes still predominating in Church policy. Importantly, the study suggests that the compatibility of different human rights should not be assumed by sociologists.

Katayoun Baghai’s article, ‘Privacy as a Human Right: A Sociological Theory’, takes forward analysis of the right to privacy raised by Clucas, but presents and utilises frameworks from sociological theory which can be usefully applied to theorising rights much more widely. Baghai uses one of the founding theorists of sociology, Simmel, to understand the social operation of privacy in contemporary societies; then focuses on Niklas Luhmann to conceptualise the functions of privacy. This illustrates a wider turn to Luhmann in the sociology of human rights (King and Thornhill, 2006; Thornhill, 2010). Baghai’s article thus directs sociological attention to an important and vibrant body of emerging work, regarding law as a communicative system, and emphasising how functionally differentiated communicative systems in society have a systematic interplay.

The final contribution is by Anthony Woodiwiss: ‘Asia, Enforceable Benevolence and the Future of Human Rights’. Woodiwiss takes up a theme from his earlier work, that of the possibilities of rights being employed in ways that transcend liberal individualism if they are to be embedded in societies for which this clashes with more communitarian cultural contexts (Woodiwiss, 2009). His challenging and provocative essay proposes that if the rule of law and representative democracy could be achieved in Asian states, ‘enforceable benevolence’ – offered methodologically (in Weber’s terms) as an ‘ideal type’ of an Asian human rights regime – might be a more effective mode of governance for achieving a human rights compliant environment than the imposition of liberal individualism. This would involve rights being rewritten as duties. Such an approach is clearly a challenge to traditional ways of viewing the human rights project as the gradual universalisation of individual rights, and to human rights activists for whom such an approach could be used to undermine efforts in the Asia region to liberate oppressed populations from authoritarian regimes. However, Woodiwiss’ introduction of ‘enforceable benevolence’ is not intended to allow such regimes to avoid their human rights obligations. Woodiwiss seeks to extend sociological engagement by offering an alternative theoretical framework which empirical work could perhaps test. This article will make many in the global human rights movement uncomfortable, and we hope it will provoke much debate.

Nando Sigona’s invited review essay then considers the analysis of three groups of non-citizens by outlining the work of Lydia Morris on asylum seekers, Halleli Pinson, Madeleine Arnot and Mano Candappa on refugee children, and Rutvica Andrijasevic on migrant sex workers. The tensions between traditions and regimes of rights nested in the nation-state and rights available universally as a result of shared humanity are teased out, illustrating Lydia Morris’ emancipatory drive towards ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’ (2010: 88) in sociological thought. Finally, the Book Reviews section of the issue turns to a number of recent books related to the sociology of human rights which demonstrate both the international scope and critical depth of the field as well as illustrating some of the challenges faced by those working within it.

The Sociology of Human Rights special issue thus emerges as illustrating a rich, dynamic and fast developing field of sociological enquiry.