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The case study presented in this article analyses the social construction of India's Right to Food Act of 2013 in light of the extant literature on the social construction of human rights. It argues that Lockwood's novel hypothesis – that human rights are created by elite actors using the enhanced 'moral and material resources' that they have at their disposal, not in their own self-interests, but in the interests of the less advantaged – is borne up by the present case study, (although less advantaged social actors were involved in the campaign for the Act). The article also seeks to extend Lockwood's theory by examining which moral and material resources contributed the most to the creation of the Act and why. Finally, drawing on Waters, the article proposes that political elites' need to consolidate political support was an important factor in securing the Act. In conclusion, this paper argues that further research on the perceived needs of the less advantaged in respect of the Right to Food Act's content must be undertaken if we are to be sure it genuinely reflects their interests. The article is based on in depth socio-historical research including a review of hundreds of documents and 37 interviews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the contemporary political world order that continues to be structured by the principle of national sovereignty, the fate of human rights ultimately depends on states as the main guarantors and transgressors of rights. The analysis of the conditions and processes of their effective institutionalisation therefore requires a focus on the state level without losing sight of human rights’ universalistic potential. This article develops the ideal type of the human rights state as a sociological framework for the systematic qualitative study and assessment of human rights institutionalisation. To this end, it reconceptualises Benjamin Gregg’s normative political theory of the human rights state as an analytical yardstick that refers to the necessary conditions for the effective implementation of human rights as locally valid, state-based norms of universalistic scope. Based on the extrapolation of human rights’ core traits and their synthesis into a unified, coherent concept, the ideal type of the human rights state provides guidance for the empirical study of factual processes of human rights institutionalisation within states both as an analytical grid and benchmark for their critical evaluation. By integrating the divergent perspectives on legal, political and wider societal dimensions of human rights institutionalisation, this article contributes to the multidisciplinary field of human rights research as well as to the developing field of human rights sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We introduce this special issue on Benjamin Gregg’s recent theory of a human rights state by contextualising it within current human rights scholarship and explicating its core claims, before we provide an overview of the eight contributions. We argue that the concept of a human rights state addresses two interrelated problems within human rights research by bridging the significant disconnect in the literature between human rights theory and practice. First, it conceives human rights as socially constructed norms whose reach and validity are historically contingent, depending on their free embrace and effective implementation by their local addressees. In this way it dispenses with the ever fruitless, even counterproductive attempts to advance human rights by claims about their putative, ultimate normative foundation. Second, it overcomes the limitations and failures of the top-down, generally unenforceable international human rights regime with a bottom-up alternative: the human rights state as a metaphorical polity in which activists promote human rights-friendly change within the corresponding nation state. In each case of such a metaphorical polity, a network of self-selected activists within the nation state promotes the free embrace of self-authored human rights through incorporating those rights in the nation state’s legal and political system. Subsequently, aspirations to an international human rights law would finally be redeemed as effective norms through the overlapping agreement among more and more political communities that have freely embraced their self-authored human rights and institutionalised them at local levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]