Neil Stammers

Human Rights And Power

This paper is an initial attempt to link the concepts of human rights and power from a social constructionist perspective. It looks at aspects of the social history of natural and human rights and the relationship of this history to extant power relations. It suggests that conceptions of human rights have both challenged and sustained particular forms of power, thus playing a highly ambivalent role. The paper also examines and criticises the philosophical underpinnings of liberal and marxist approaches to the concept of human rights. In a concluding section it considers the possibility of constructing a power analysis which might provide a way of anchoring the concept of human rights in social practices.

Taking Part: Social Movements, INGOs, and Global Change

Can social movements make a difference in global politics? That question is, ultimately, one that only the historical practice of transnational social movements will answer. But is that answer likely to be heard or understood by analysts, even if it were to ring in the air around them? We think not, unless there is a fundamental shift in the way the transformative agency of social movements is conceptualized. In this article we try to substantiate this claim through a critique of existing approaches to the study of transnational social movements. We argue that the attention given to transnational social movements across several different academic disciplines has failed to generate the intellectual and disciplinary synthesis needed to understand their potential. On the contrary, the limitations of each discipline have simply been replicated by others, leaving the field cluttered with incommensurable or overlapping analyses, concepts, and jargon. Investigation of the relationship between social movements and global change is relatively new. Only in the last decade or so has a distinct literature on this topic emerged. Debates in the theory of international relations about the role of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and movements have clustered around the notions of global civil society and global governance. At the same time, a more unified body of work has emerged from politics and sociology that attempts to globalize existing approaches to social movements. These two branches of enquiry frequently focus on similar kinds of movement activism and organization. They have