Why do powerful states like the U.S., U.K., China, and Russia repeatedly fail to meet their international legal obligations as defined by human rights instruments? How does global capitalism affect states’ ability to implement human rights, particularly in the context of global recession, state austerity, perpetual war, and environmental crisis? How are political and civil rights undermined as part of moves to impose security and surveillance regimes? 

This book presents a framework for understanding human rights as a terrain of struggle over power between states, private interests, and organized, “bottom-up” social movements. The authors develop a critical sociology of human rights focusing on the concept of the human rights enterprise: the process through which rights are defined and realized. While states are designated arbiters of human rights according to human rights instruments, they do not exist in a vacuum. Political sociology helps us to understand how global neoliberalism and powerful non-governmental actors (particularly economic actors such as corporations and financial institutions) deeply affect states’ ability and likelihood to enforce human rights standards.

This book offers keen insights for understanding rights claims, and the institutionalization of, access to, and restrictions on human rights. It will be invaluable to human rights advocates, and undergraduate and graduate students across the social sciences.

Asserting a critical sociological perspective, Human Rights Praxis and the Struggle for Survival reveals the contested historical processes through which fundamental human needs are constructed as “rights” under international law, and how those rights are confronted by the ruling relations and crises inherent to contemporary global capitalism and the waning American hegemonic world order.

Put simply, the book explores why human rights as a formal legal project has failed to deliver on guaranteeing human survival, let alone universal human dignity. Rather than stopping at critique, the authors propose a specific, materialist intellectual and political agenda for the preservation of collective human survival that can achieve the historically unique notions of common humanity and human emancipation. The authors build on previous work, further developing the sociology of human rights as a distinct field at the intersection of Social Sciences and International Law. They take on several provocative theoretical debates, such as those over connections between racism and capitalism; the existence of a global or “transnational” police state; the control, growth, and exploitation of migrants/migration; and the complex relationship between political repression and various forms of domination.

Human Rights Praxis and the Struggle for Survival offers critical analysis of contemporary politics and options for students, scholars, organizers, and stakeholders to grapple with some of the most pressing social problems of human history.

Why do powerful states like the U.S., U.K., China, and Russia repeatedly fail to meet their international legal obligations as defined by human rights instruments? How does global capitalism affect states’ ability to implement human rights, particularly in the context of global recession, state austerity, perpetual war, and environmental crisis? How are political and civil rights undermined as part of moves to impose security and surveillance regimes? 

This book presents a framework for understanding human rights as a terrain of struggle over power between states, private interests, and organized, “bottom-up” social movements. The authors develop a critical sociology of human rights focusing on the concept of the human rights enterprise: the process through which rights are defined and realized. While states are designated arbiters of human rights according to human rights instruments, they do not exist in a vacuum. Political sociology helps us to understand how global neoliberalism and powerful non-governmental actors (particularly economic actors such as corporations and financial institutions) deeply affect states’ ability and likelihood to enforce human rights standards.

This book offers keen insights for understanding rights claims, and the institutionalization of, access to, and restrictions on human rights. It will be invaluable to human rights advocates, and undergraduate and graduate students across the social sciences.

Asserting a critical sociological perspective, Human Rights Praxis and the Struggle for Survival reveals the contested historical processes through which fundamental human needs are constructed as “rights” under international law, and how those rights are confronted by the ruling relations and crises inherent to contemporary global capitalism and the waning American hegemonic world order.

Put simply, the book explores why human rights as a formal legal project has failed to deliver on guaranteeing human survival, let alone universal human dignity. Rather than stopping at critique, the authors propose a specific, materialist intellectual and political agenda for the preservation of collective human survival that can achieve the historically unique notions of common humanity and human emancipation. The authors build on previous work, further developing the sociology of human rights as a distinct field at the intersection of Social Sciences and International Law. They take on several provocative theoretical debates, such as those over connections between racism and capitalism; the existence of a global or “transnational” police state; the control, growth, and exploitation of migrants/migration; and the complex relationship between political repression and various forms of domination.

Human Rights Praxis and the Struggle for Survival offers critical analysis of contemporary politics and options for students, scholars, organizers, and stakeholders to grapple with some of the most pressing social problems of human history.