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Memories of historical events like the Holocaust have played a key role in the internationalization of human rights. Their importance lies in their ability to bridge the universal and the particular—the universality of human values and the particularity of memories rooted in local human experiences. In Human Rights and Memory, Levy and Sznaider trace the growth of human rights discourse since World War II and interpret its deployment of memories as a new form of cosmopolitanism, exemplifying a dynamic through which global concerns become part of local experiences, and vice versa.

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Globalization has affected everyone’s lives, and the reactions to it have been mixed. Legal scholars and political scientists tend to emphasize its harmful aspects, while economists tend to emphasize its benefits. Those concerned about human rights have more often been among the critics than among the supporters of globalization. In Can Globalization Promote Human Rights? Rhoda Howard-Hassmann presents a balanced account of the negative and positive features of globalization in relation to human rights, in both their economic and civil/political dimensions.
On the positive side, she draws on substantial empirical work to show that globalization has significantly reduced world poverty levels, even while, on the negative side, it has exacerbated economic inequality across and within countries. Ultimately, she argues, social action and political decision making will determine whether the positive effects of globalization outweigh the negatives. And, in contrast to those who prefer either schemes for redistributing wealth on moral grounds or authoritarian socialist approaches, she makes the case for social democracy as the best political system for the protection of all human rights, civil and political as well as economic.

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The mass violence of the twentieth century’s two world wars—followed more recently by decentralized and privatized warfare, manifested in terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and other localized forms of killing—has led to a heightened awareness of human beings’ vulnerability and the precarious nature of the institutions they create to protect themselves from violence and exploitation. This vulnerability, something humans share amid the diversity of cultural beliefs and values that mark their differences, provides solid ground on which to construct a framework of human rights. Bryan Turner undertakes this task here, developing a sociology of rights from a sociology of the human body. His blending of empirical research with normative analysis constitutes an important step forward for the discipline of sociology. Like anthropology, sociology has traditionally eschewed the study of justice as beyond the limits of a discipline that pays homage to cultural relativism and the “value neutrality” of positivistic science. Turner’s expanded approach accordingly involves a truly interdisciplinary dialogue with the literature of economics, law, medicine, philosophy, political science, and religion.

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