Human Rights

This volume includes contributions of scholars from various fields - the social sciences, journalism, the humanities and the arts - whose work offers insightful and innovative ways to understand the devastating and unprecedented forms of violence currently experienced in Latin America. As an interdisciplinary endeavor, it offers an array of perspectives that contribute to ongoing debates in the study of violence in the region.

Patients of the State is a sociological account of the extended waiting that poor people seeking state social and administrative services must endure. It is based on ethnographic research in the waiting area of the main welfare office in Buenos Aires, in the line leading into the Argentine registration office where legal aliens apply for identification cards, and among people who live in a polluted shantytown on the capital's outskirts, while waiting to be allocated better housing. Scrutinizing the mundane interactions between the poor and the state, as well as underprivileged people's confusion and uncertainty about the administrative processes that affect them, Javier Auyero argues that while waiting, the poor learn the opposite of citizenship. They learn to be patients of the state. They absorb the message that they should be patient and keep waiting, because there is nothing else that they can do. Drawing attention to a significant everyday dynamic that has received little scholarly attention until now, Auyero considers not only how the poor experience these lengthy waits but also how making poor people wait works as a strategy of state control.

Most conceptions of human rights rely on metaphysical or theological assumptions that construe them as possible only as something imposed from outside existing communities. Most people, in other words, presume that human rights come from nature, God, or the United Nations. This book argues that reliance on such putative sources actually undermines human rights. Benjamin Gregg envisions an alternative; he sees human rights as locally developed, freely embraced, and indigenously valid. Human rights, he posits, can be created by the average, ordinary people to whom they are addressed, and that they are valid only if embraced by those to whom they would apply. To view human rights in this manner is to increase the chances and opportunities that more people across the globe will come to embrace them.

The nation state operates on a logic of exclusion: no state can offer citizenship and legal rights to all comers. From the logic of exclusion a state derives its sovereign power. Yet this exclusivity undermines the project of advancing human rights globally. That project operates on a logic of inclusion: all people, regardless of citizenship status or territorial location, would everywhere be recognized as bearers of human rights. In practice, human rights are afforded, if at all, then only to citizens of those few states that sometimes regard human rights as moral necessities of domestic commitments--or for states that find that stance politically expedient for the moment. This discouraging reality in the first decades of the twenty-first century prompts the question: What political arrangement might better conduce the local embrace and enduring practice of human rights? In The Human Rights State, Benjamin Gregg challenges the conviction that the nation state can only have a zero-sum relationship with human rights: national sovereignty is possible or human rights are possible, but not both, not in the same place, at the same time. He argues that the human rights project would be more effective if established and enforced at local levels as locally valid norms, and from there encouraged to expand outward toward overlaps with other locally established and enforced conceptions of human rights grown in their own local soils. Proposing a metaphorical human rights state that operates within or alongside a nation state, Gregg describes networks of activists that encourage local political and legal systems to generate domestic obligations to enforce human rights. Geographic boundaries and national sovereignties would remain intact but diminished to the extent necessary to extend human rights to all persons, without reservation, across national borders, by rendering human rights an integral aspect of the nation state's constitution.

From Brown v. Board of Education to Roe v. Wade to Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court has, over the past fifty years, assumed an increasingly controversial place in American national political life. As the recurring struggles over nominations to the Court illustrate, few questions today divide our political community more profoundly than those concerning the Court's proper role as protector of liberties and guardian of the Constitution. If the nation is today in the midst of a "culture war," the contest over the Supreme Court is certainly one of its principal battlefields. In this volume, distinguished constitutional scholars aim to move debate beyond the sound bites that divide the opposing parties to more fundamental discussions about the nature of constitutionalism. Toward this end, the volume includes chapters on the philosophical and historical origins of the idea of constitutionalism; on theories of constitutionalism in American history in particular; on the practices of constitutionalism around the globe; and on the parallel emergence of--and the persistent tensions between--constitutionalism and democracy throughout the modern world. In democracies, the primary point of having a constitution is to place some matters beyond politics and partisan contest. And yet it seems equally clear that constitutionalism of this kind results in a struggle over the meaning or proper interpretation of the constitution, a struggle that is itself deeply political. Although the volume represents a variety of viewpoints and approaches, this struggle, which is the central paradox of constitutionalism, is the ultimate theme of all the essays.

In Understanding Social Action, Promoting Human Rights, editors Ryan Goodman, Derek Jinks, and Andrew K. Woods bring together a stellar group of contributors from across the social sciences to apply a broad yet conceptually unified array of advanced social science research concepts to the study of human rights and human rights law. The book focuses on three key methodological and substantive areas: actors and their biases; groups and group dynamics, via political economy and social network analysis; and communication, covering health communications, media studies, and social norms research. Their goal is to provide a richer and more integrated approach to the study and practice of human rights, which necessarily requires a more comprehensive and practical theory of social action.

The deeply entrenched patterns of racial inequality in the United States simply do not square with the liberal notion of a nation-state of equal citizens. Uncovering the false promise of liberalism, State of White Supremacy reveals race to be a fundamental, if flexible, ruling logic that perpetually generates and legitimates racial hierarchy and privilege. Racial domination and violence in the United States are indelibly marked by its origin and ongoing development as an empire-state. The widespread misrecognition of the United States as a liberal nation-state hinges on the twin conditions of its approximation for the white majority and its impossibility for their racial others. The essays in this book incisively probe and critique the U.S. racial state through a broad range of topics, including citizenship, education, empire, gender, genocide, geography, incarceration, Islamophobia, migration and border enforcement, violence, and welfare.