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ABSTRACT
In the contemporary political world order that continues to be structured by the principle of national sovereignty, the fate of human rights ultimately depends on states as the main guarantors and transgressors of rights. The analysis of the conditions and processes of their effective institutionalisation therefore requires a focus on the state level without losing sight of human rights’ universalistic potential. This article develops the ideal type of the human rights state as a sociological framework for the systematic qualitative study and assessment of human rights institutionalisation. To this end, it reconceptualises Benjamin Gregg’s normative political theory of the human rights state as an analytical yardstick that refers to the necessary conditions for the effective implementation of human rights as locally valid, state-based norms of universalistic scope. Based on the extrapolation of human rights’ core traits and their synthesis into a unified, coherent concept, the ideal type of the human rights state provides guidance for the empirical study of factual processes of human rights institutionalisation within states both as an analytical grid and benchmark for their critical evaluation. By integrating the divergent perspectives on legal, political and wider societal dimensions of human rights institutionalisation, this article contributes to the multidisciplinary field of human rights research as well as to the developing field of human rights sociology.
Acknowledgements
For helpful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this article I would like to thank Elisabeth Badenhoop, Nigel Fabb, Benjamin Gregg, Kelly Kollman, Matthew Waites, and the external reviewer.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
René Wolfsteller is a member of the Glasgow Human Rights Network and is currently finishing his PhD research on the institutionalisation of human rights in Britain since 1998 at the University of Glasgow. He holds a BA in Social Sciences, Philosophy, and Political Sciences from the University of Leipzig, Germany, and an MA in Political Theory from the Goethe University Frankfurt and the Technical University Darmstadt. Before coming to Glasgow, he worked as a research assistant at the University of St. Gallen’s Law School in Switzerland.
Notes
1. Kate Nash, The Political Sociology of Human Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 5.
2. James W. Nickel, Making Sense of Human Rights (Malden: Blackwell, 2007), 7–9.
3. Mikael Rask Madsen and Gert Verschraegen, ‘Making Human Rights Intelligible: An Introduction to a Sociology of Human Rights’, in Making Human Rights Intelligible: Towards a Sociology of Human Rights, ed. Mikael Rask Madsen and Gert Verschraegen (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2013), 9.
4. This conception of institutionalisation draws on definitions of institution by: Jonathan Turner, The Institutional Order (New York: Longman, 1997), 6; Paul James and Ronen Palan, ‘Globalizing Economic Regimes and Institutions: A Critical Introduction’, in Globalization and Economy, Vol. 3: Globalizing Economic Regimes and Institutions, ed. Paul James and Ronen Palan (London: SAGE, 2006), xiv.
5. Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 95. Even the European human rights regime, which is commonly regarded as the most effective international human rights system, cannot enforce a judicial decision of the European Court of Human Rights against a member state but has to rely on that state government’s willingness to comply with the ruling and to implement it effectively.
6. Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, 32–4; but on the problem of limited statehood for the implementation of human rights on the ground, see: Tanja A. Börzel and Thomas Risse, ‘Human Rights in Areas of Limited Statehood: The New Agenda’, in The Persistent Power of Human Rights: From Commitment to Compliance, ed. Thomas Risse, Stephen C. Ropp, and Kathryn Sikkink (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 63–84.
7. Benjamin Gregg, Human Rights as Social Construction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 219, 223.
8. Nash, The Political Sociology of Human Rights, 163. While international human rights law obliges states to observe and protect the rights of their own nationals and of non-nationals subject to their jurisdiction, some important rights (e.g. of political participation) are limited to citizens only, and there is no international obligation for states towards non-citizens outside of their legal control. Moreover, the prioritisation of citizens over non-citizens is built into international human rights law in so far as it recognises the right of members of a national community to political self-determination, which includes the freedom to determine their political status.
9. Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, ‘Introduction: Genealogies of Human Rights’, in Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, ed. Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 14. The nation state may be a social and political myth, as Sylvia Walby points out, but it continues to be extremely persistent and efficacious as a regulative concept. Sylvia Walby, ‘The Myth of the Nation-State: Theorizing Society and Polities in a Global Era’, Sociology 37, no. 3 (2003): 529–46.
10. Saladin Meckled-Garcia and Basak Cali, ‘Lost in Translation: The Human Rights Ideal and International Human Rights Law’, in The Legalization of Human Rights: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Human Rights and Human Rights Law, ed. Saladin Meckled-Garcia and Basak Cali (London: Routledge, 2006), 11–31.
11. Lydia Morris, Human Rights and Social Theory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 97.
12. Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, trans. ed. Edward Shils and Henry Finch (New York: Free Press, 1968), 90.
13. Ibid.
14. Gregg, Human Rights as Social Construction.
15. Benjamin Gregg, The Human Rights State: Justice Within and Beyond Sovereign Nations (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
16. Michael Freeman, Human Rights: An Interdisciplinary Approach (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), 8; Saladin Meckled-Garcia and Basak Cali, ‘Introduction: Human Rights Legalized – Defining, Interpreting, and Implementing an Ideal’, in The Legalization of Human Rights, 3.
17. Marie-Bénédicte Dembour, ‘What Are Human Rights? Four Schools of Thought’, Human Rights Quarterly 32, no. 1 (2010): 19; James W. Nickel, Making Sense of Human Rights, 7–9.
18. Christian Tomuschat, Human Rights: Between Idealism and Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Eric Posner, The Twilight of Human Rights Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
19. Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, 11. See, for instance: Christof Heyns and Waruguru Kaguongo, ‘Constitutional Human Rights Law in Africa’, South African Journal on Human Rights 22, no. 4 (2006): 673–717.
20. Nickel, Making Sense of Human Rights, 7.
21. Tomuschat, Human Rights: Between Idealism and Realism; Brian Lepard, ‘International Law and Human Rights’, in Handbook of Human Rights, ed. Thomas Cushman (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 583–97; Andrew Byrnes and Catherine Renshaw, ‘Within the State’, in International Human Rights Law, ed. Daniel Moeckli, Sangeeta Shah and Sandesh Sivakumaran (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 459.
22. Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, 95.
23. Posner, The Twilight of Human Rights Law, 40–7. See also Lepard, ‘International Law and Human Rights’, 591–2.
24. Freeman, Human Rights, 91–2; Hoffmann, ‘Introduction’, 6–7; Charles Epp, The Rights Revolution: Lawyers, Activists, and Supreme Courts in Comparative Perspective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 13–14.
25. David Hoffman and John Rowe, Human Rights in the UK: An Introduction to the Human Rights Act 1998 (Harlow: Longman Pearson Education, 2010), 33. On the relationship between human rights and anti-colonial independence movements, see Jan Eckel, Die Ambivalenz des Guten: Menschenrechte in der internationalen Politik seit den 1940ern (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2014), 269–76.
26. Epp, The Rights Revolution.
27. Kamal Hossain et al., eds, Human Rights Commissions and Ombudsman Offices: National Experiences Throughout the World (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 2000); Ryan Goodman and Thomas Pegram, eds, Human Rights, State Compliance, and Social Change: Assessing National Human Rights Institutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Murray Hunt, Hayley Hooper, and Paul Yowell, eds, Parliaments and Human Rights: Redressing the Democratic Deficit (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2015).
28. Jack Donnelly, ‘The Virtues of Legalization’, in The Legalization of Human Rights, 78.
29. On the generic limits of a legalistic perspective on human rights, see: Freeman, Human Rights, 90–8, and Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, 36–9.
30. On the dominance of realist and positivist perspectives in political science and international relations as reasons for the relatively late discovery of human rights by political scientists, see Freeman, Human Rights, 99. On the rise of the international human rights movement and of transnational human rights organisations, see Jan Eckel and Samuel Moyn, eds, The Breakthrough: Human Rights in the 1970s (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014).
31. Thomas Risse, Stephen C. Ropp, and Kathryn Sikkink, eds, The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink, The Persistent Power of Human Rights.
32. Thomas Risse and Stephen C. Ropp, ‘Introduction and Overview’, in The Persistent Power of Human Rights, 10, original emphasis.
33. Thomas Risse and Kathryn Sikkink, ‘The Socialization of International Human Rights Norms into Domestic Practices: Introduction’, in The Power of Human Rights, 17.
34. Thomas Risse and Stephen C. Ropp, ‘International Human Rights Norms and Domestic Change: Conclusions’, in The Power of Human Rights, 249, 277.
35. Brysk acknowledges that, during the human rights change in Argentina, polls indicated public support for democracy but low agreement with human rights as such, yet without drawing conclusions for her analysis; see Alison Brysk, The Politics of Human Rights in Argentina: Protest, Change, and Democratization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 130–1.
36. Risse and Ropp, ‘Introduction and Overview’, 15; see also Anja Jetschke and Andrea Liese, ‘The Power of Human Rights a Decade After: From Euphoria to Contestation?’ in The Persistent Power of Human Rights, 35.
37. See Alison Brysk, Global Good Samaritans: Human Rights as Foreign Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 234; Risse and Ropp, ‘International Human Rights Norms and Domestic Change: Conclusions’, 234; Thomas Risse and Kathryn Sikkink, ‘Conclusions’, in The Persistent Power of Human Rights, 277.
38. Oona Hathaway, ‘Do Human Rights Treaties Make a Difference?’ Yale Law Journal 111, no. 8 (2002): 1935–2042; Emilie Hafner-Burton and Kiyoteru Tsutsui, ‘Justice Lost! The Failure of International Human Rights Law to Matter Where Needed Most’, Journal of Peace Research 44, no. 4 (2007): 407–25; Beth A. Simmons, Mobilizing for Human Rights: International Law in Domestic Politics (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Posner, The Twilight of Human Rights Law.
39. Emilie Hafner-Burton, Making Human Rights Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013); Jürgen Habermas, ‘The Concept of Human Dignity and the Realistic Utopia of Human Rights’, Metaphilosophy 41, no. 4 (2010): 464–80; Makau Mutua, Human Rights: A Political and Cultural Critique (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).
40. Meckled-Garcia and Cali, ‘Lost in Translation’.
41. Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, 33; Nash, The Political Sociology of Human Rights, 163.
42. See, for instance, Risse and Sikkink, ‘The Socialization of International Human Rights Norms into Domestic Practices: Introduction’; Brysk, The Politics of Human Rights in Argentina; Simmons, Mobilizing for Human Rights.
43. Risse and Sikkink, ‘The Socialization of International Human Rights Norms into Domestic Practices: Introduction’, 3–4.
44. Bryan S. Turner, ‘Outline of a Theory of Human Rights’, Sociology 27, no. 3 (1993): 175–6; Margaret Somers and Christopher Roberts, ‘Toward a New Sociology of Rights: A Genealogy of “Buried Bodies” of Citizenship and Human Rights’, Annual Review of Law and Social Sciences 4, no. 1 (2008): 388.
45. Christopher Thornhill, ‘Sociological Enlightenments and the Sociology of Political Philosophy’, Revue Internationale de Philosophie 66, no. 1 (2012): 55–83.
46. Patricia Hynes et al., ‘Sociology and Human Rights: Confrontations, Evasions and New Engagements’, International Journal of Human Rights 14, no. 6 (2012): 6; Mark Frezzo, The Sociology of Human Rights: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), xiii, 36–7.
47. Robert Fine, Cosmopolitanism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007); Gerard Delanty, The Cosmopolitan Imagination: The Renewal of Critical Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Ulrich Beck and Natan Sznaider, ‘Unpacking Cosmopolitanism for the Social Sciences: A Research Agenda’, The British Journal of Sociology 57, no. 1 (2006): 12–13.
48. Robert Fine, ‘Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights: Radicalism in a Global Age’, Metaphilosophy 40, no. 1 (2009): 8.
49. Ibid.
50. Beck and Sznaider, ‘Unpacking Cosmopolitanism for the Social Sciences’, 9; Lydia Morris, ‘Cosmopolitanism – Beyond the “Beautiful Idea”’, Irish Journal of Sociology 20, no. 2 (2012): 51; Kate Nash, ‘Between Citizenship and Human Rights’, Sociology 46, no. 6 (2009): 1067–83.
51. Fine, ‘Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights’, 19.
52. Damien Short, ‘Sociological and Anthropological Approaches’, in Human Rights: Politics and Practice, ed. Michael Goodhart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 93; Neil Stammers, Human Rights and Social Movements (London: Pluto Press, 2009), 104.
53. Kate Nash, The Cultural Politics of Human Rights: Comparing the US and UK (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
54. Nash, The Cultural Politics of Human Rights, 13.
55. Gregg, Human Rights as Social Construction.
56. Ibid., 4, 135–56.
57. Ibid., 216, 219.
58. Ibid., 217.
59. Ibid., 214.
60. Benjamin Gregg, The Human Rights State: A User’s Guide (Unpublished manuscript of the keynote delivered at the University of Glasgow to the conference of the Postgraduate Cluster of the Glasgow Human Rights Network, 20 May 2015), 4.
61. Posner, The Twilight of Human Rights Law, 4.
62. Gregg, The Human Rights State: A User’s Guide, 4.
63. Gregg, Human Rights as Social Construction, 212.
64. Brysk, Global Good Samaritans; Gershon Shafir, ‘Citizenship and Human Rights in an Era of Globalization’, in People Out of Place: Globalization, Human Rights, and the Citizenship Gap, ed. Alison Brysk and Gershon Shafir (New York: Routledge, 2004), 11–25; Hafner-Burton, Making Human Rights Reality.
65. Gregg, Human Rights as Social Construction, 222.
66. Ibid., 213.
67. Ibid., 216.
68. Gregg, The Human Rights State, 2.
69. Gregg, Human Rights as Social Construction, 225.
70. Ibid., 224.
71. John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, 1995); John Searle, Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
72. Gregg, Human Rights as Social Construction, 225–6.
73. Gregg, The Human Rights State, 212.
74. Ibid., 213.
75. Ibid.
76. Gregg, Human Rights as Social Construction, 226.
77. Gregg, The Human Rights State, 6.
78. Ibid., 84.
79. Ibid., 6–7, 84–7.
80. Gregg, Human Rights as Social Construction, 225, 229.
81. Gregg, The Human Rights State, 214.
82. Ibid., 213–4.
83. Ibid., 167–9.
84. Ibid., 6.
85. Gregg, Human Rights as Social Construction, 217.
86. Ibid., 213.
87. Ibid., 227–8.
88. Gregg, The Human Rights State, 214.
89. Gregg, Human Rights as Social Construction, 227.
90. Ibid., 213.
91. Ibid., 228.
92. Gregg, The Human Rights State, 15–16.
93. Gregg, Human Rights as Social Construction, 220.
94. Ibid., 232.
95. Kate Nash, ‘Towards a Political Sociology of Human Rights’, in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Political Sociology, ed. Edwin Amenta, Kate Nash, and Alan Scott (Malden: Blackwell, 2012), 445.
96. Oswald Schwemmer, ‘Idealtypus’, in Enzyklopädie Philosophie und Wissenschaftstheorie, Vol. 2, ed. Jürgen Mittelstraß (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1995), 175.
97. Uta Gerhardt, Idealtypus. Zur methodologischen Begründung der modernen Soziologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 248.
98. Stephen Kalberg, The Social Thought of Max Weber (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2017), 43.
99. Susan Hekman, Weber, the Ideal Type, and Contemporary Social Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 15.
100. Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, 72.
101. Ibid., 78.
102. Ibid.
103. Hekman, Weber, the Ideal Type, and Contemporary Social Theory, 28–9.
104. Ibid., 30.
105. Ibid.
106. Ibid.
107. Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, 90, all original emphases.
108. Ibid., 91–2.
109. Ibid., 92.
110. Ibid.
111. Kalberg, The Social Thought of Max Weber, 43.
112. Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, 93.
113. Kalberg, The Social Thought of Max Weber, 44.
114. Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, 92.
115. Short, ‘Sociological and Anthropological Approaches’, 93.
116. Ibid., 96.
117. Gregg, Human Rights as Social Construction, 213; Nash, The Political Sociology of Human Rights, 171.
118. Gregg, Human Rights as Social Construction, 216; Sally Engle Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law Into Local Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
119. See the critical discussion in: Kate Nash, ‘Human Rights, Movements and Law: On Not Researching Legitimacy’, Sociology 46, no. 5 (2012): 797–812.
120. Malcolm Waters, ‘Globalisation and the Social Construction of Human Rights’, The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology 31, no. 2 (1995): 29–35.
121. Jürgen Habermas, ‘Zur Legitimation durch Menschenrechte’, in Die postnationale Konstellation: Politische Essays, ed. Jürgen Habermas (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), 115, 131.
122. Posner, The Twilight of Human Rights Law, 13; Hans Joas, The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013), 85–96.
123. Nash, The Political Sociology of Human Rights, 42.
124. Shafir, ‘Citizenship and Human Rights in an Era of Globalization’.
125. Gregg, Human Rights as Social Construction, 217.
126. Ibid., 214, 223; Risse and Ropp, ‘International Human Rights Norms and Domestic Change: Conclusions’, 261.
127. Alison Brysk and Gershon Shafir, ‘Introduction: Globalization and the Citizenship Gap’, in People Out of Place, 3–9.
128. Nash, The Political Sociology of Human Rights, 17, 42.
129. Gregg, The Human Rights State, 212.
130. Ibid., 84, 213–4.
131. Freeman, Human Rights, 91–2; Epp, The Rights Revolution, 13–14.
132. Gregg, The Human Rights State, 84.