The social science of human rights: The need for a 'second image reversed'?

College

College of Liberal Arts

Department/Unit

Political Science

Document Type

Article

Source Title

Third World Quarterly

Volume

35

Issue

8

First Page

1390

Last Page

1405

Publication Date

2014

Abstract

What are the causes of state- initiated human rights violations? Are intra-national factors alone causally responsible for the emergence of human rights crises in the developing world? This article critically examines contemporary social science literature on the causes of human rights compliance and violations, particularly in the fields of international relations and comparative politics. It underscores the finding that the current research agenda on human right has yet to fully recognize the causal constitutive agenda on links between transnational and domestic factors in generating variations in states' level of com­pliance. The main goal bf the piper is to analytically explore the pos­sibilities of generating social scientific research that recognizes the interactive causal dynamics among extra-national and domestic vari­ables as they jointly produce cross-national variations in the quality of a state's compliance with human rights norms. Based on a critical analysis of the current scholarship in human rights research, the-pap.er offers several pathways ·. the academy must traverse in order to enhance our understanding of the causal underpinnings of human rights violations in the global South.

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Disciplines

Human Rights Law

Keywords

Human rights; Human rights and globalization; International law and human rights

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