Suchergebnisse

The sociology of international norms has often focused on human rights in order to illustrate the "power of ideas" to inform policies: as the story goes, the successful institutionalization of human rights principles under the Carter administration forced the Reagan administration to adjust its policies to principles it could not uproot or use for purely legitimating purposes. The paper argues that these approaches ignore the disputed nature of political-legal concepts & the fact that their very definition is at stake in struggles between contending groups of actors seeking to use these concepts in order to legitimate different policy courses. Mapping out the field of producers of the human rights discourse in the late 1970s-early 1980s, both in their civil & governmental components, the paper shows that the concept of human rights can be construed in two different ways, each corresponding to specific social groups & policy interests: one that anchors human rights in the field of international law, promoted essentially by lawyers or activists connected with international organizations; the other turning it into an anti-juridical concept primarily concerned with political regimes & "democracy promotion," & elaborated by neoconservative policy makers. Adapted from the source document.

While regimes theory has analyzed relatively well the process by which norms propagate, it fails to explain why & how an imposed norm or policy may become a value or a truth to international relations actors. The argument is that the legitimation process is the basis of a regime's emergence, persistence, & demise. This article proposes a Foucauldian version of regime theory, close to constructivism, as a potentially fruitful way of empirically addressing these questions. Some preliminary results of two research efforts now underway are presented, one on the dissemination of participation & sustainability norms in dams, the other on public participation in environmental public policy in France since the 1970s. The results of a third study, undertaken in Ghana in 1999, are also presented. Adapted from the source document.

The present paper defends two distinct rescues indicated by my recent book title, Rescuing Justice and Equality. Part One pursues the rescue of justice from constructivism. It is about the identity of justice. Part Two pursues the rescue of equality from the basic structure restriction. It is about the scope of justice. The identity question is at issue in an argument that I present against the Rawlsian identification of justice with the principles that constructivist selectors select. The scope question is at issue in an argument that I present against the Rawlsian restriction of the application of principles of distributive justice to the basic structure of society. The two Rawlsian positions (on identity and on scope) here under criticism are, as I shall explain, mainly in a very brief Part Three, substantially independent of each other, and so, too, as will be seen, are my arguments against them. Adapted from the source document.