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Contemporary Japan maintains longstanding and well-documented traditions of same-sex eroticism and yet the terminology for describing these traditions as well as the contexts and identities through which they have been expressed have changed greatly since Japan's opening to the West at the end of the nineteenth century. These changes have been most striking in the post-war period, when new rights-centred discourses concerning issues of sexual identity and sexual citizenship began to develop alongside enduring Japanese notions situating sexual expression in the private realm of personal interest or play. Taking a broad historical view, this paper shows that it is only since the mid-1980s that a voluble discourse linking same-sex sexual activity and human rights has gained mainstream attention. The factors that led to this paradigm shift are outlined as are the current and future challenges facing a range of sexual minorities in Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within economics there is a philosophical impasse that prevents humanity addressing the ethical quandary that is epitomised by the negative social impacts of the globalised corporation. This impasse has created a void which is being filled by corporate social responsibility even though corporate social responsibility does not exist to, and could not, solve this ethical quandary. Humanity can bridge this impasse by viewing the corporation in sociological terms as a functional system that can be manipulated for the purposes of humanity. Pigouvian taxation is a proven method of manipulating the corporation and may be useful in achieving this objective. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Anthropogenic climate change poses the possibility of total human extinction. Subsistence societies, however, have been threatened with extinction ­primarily as a consequence of systemic development ­ for a very long time. Recent genocide scholarship, more particularly in relation to indigenous peoples, has engaged with some of these issues, even while terminologies such as ethnocide, cultural genocide, and indigenocide may suggest a restricted field of vision. Here, we argue that the very nature of a neoliberal globalisation and concomitant nation-state building makesallsubsistence societies vulnerable to what amounts to structural genocide. But how does climate change exacerbate or complicate this bleak picture? The political economy of ‘business as usual’ in its dialectical relationship with the biosphere (expressed in the rising concentrations of greenhouse gas emissions) poses an acceleration of subsistence society vulnerability with catastrophic potential for extreme violence. But another scenario also presents itself. The very ongoing, seemingly impossible existence of non-marketised societies in direct relationship with nature, poses the possibility oftheirresilience in the face of climate change rather than those operating according to standard globalised norms. In conclusion, we propose that the crisis of anthropogenic climate change directly challenges not only assumptions about the ‘inevitable’ trajectory of globalisation with its supposed cast of survivors and victims but more precisely the purposefulness of ‘techno-rational’ epistemologies as set against those which might help humanity recover the possibility of a ‘moral economy’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human rights declarations provide the right for any person to leave their country, yet do not provide the right to enter another country, stopping halfway in asserting a right to mobility. In this article we provide evidence that 1) state policies and actions create migration flows; 2) migrants often travel to fulfil their human rights; and 3) current restrictions on immigration curtail migrants' human rights. We argue, based on sociological evidence, that the right to mobility is a fundamental human right, and deserves a place in human rights doctrine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007) marks a significant shift in the relations whereby indigenous peoples define themselves and their claims. They are now faced with the challenge of implementing international standards within national spaces. By adopting a global comparative perspective, our article aims to explore how this movement unfolds in a variety of local issues and strategies, building transnational links and differences. We first examine the acceptance of indigenous peoples' status across the globe before exploring the transformative effects of recognition around two major themes, indigenous rights to education and to land and natural resources. We argue that the recognition of indigenous peoples as subjects of international law has far-ranging implications for the global system as a whole, implicating other global or transnational agents, and potentially affecting the balance between economic and political powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

1Information and communications technologies (ICTs) prominently feature in the current wave of globalisation. Sceptics of globalisation suggest that the new technology will hamstring governments from acting in the interests of ordinary people and for furthering communitarian values, leading to demobilisation of reform movements and empowering powerful capitalistic elites. Others suggest that the new technologies will empower people at the expense of states, opening up public space for diversity of opinions and constraining the repressive tendencies of states and bureaucracies. Moreover, the new technologies may also allow mass dissent to mobilise more easily and hamstring the repressive power of states due to transparency and global audience costs. We address the issue by specifically assessing the effects of older technologies relative to new ones, controlling for time independently. We find very clear results suggesting that new ICTs, particularly access to the internet and mobile phones, are associated with better human rights, whereas access to televisions and fixed phone lines are associated with worse human rights. It seems that the new ICTs are qualitatively better for human rights than the old ones. Our results are robust to a host of different controls, testing methods and to the inclusion of time trends as a separate variable. The results taken together do not support pessimistic arguments about how new technologies can raise the level of dangerous dissent and provoke harsher human rights practices by governments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]