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How do we study what difference human rights make to existing social forms – for good or for ill? Pragmatic sociology, with its emphasis on the importance of principles of justice as intrinsic to social life, is an attractive starting point for exploring such questions. Breaking with perspectives in which social life is seen as structured by violence, self-interest or habit, which all too easily and automatically position human rights as nothing but neo-liberal imperialist ideology, pragmatic sociology opens up the study of disputes, uncertainty and socially embedded moral argument in ways that can only be promising. Boltanski’s ground-breaking book, Distant Suffering (1990 [1993]), is itself a landmark contribution to the field - although it is on humanitarianism and responses to suffering rather than on principles of justice and human rights. It was Distant Suffering that first led me to Boltanski’s work (Nash, 2008). Reading further, however, it is striking that Boltanski has written nothing explicitly on human rights, despite the concerns of pragmatic sociology with contemporary questions of justice.

NGOs are currently involved in attempts to bring International Financial Institutions (IFIs) in line with international human rights law. In this paper I argue that approaches to humanizing global capitalism are not doomed by the nature of capitalism as such (as Marxists suppose). Indeed, the cultural politics in which NGOs and those sympathetic to human rights within IFIs have been engaged over the last twenty years has made some difference to the policies adopted by the World Bank. However, the geo-political structures of the IFIs and the nature of capitalist competition make it legitimate, necessary even, for sovereign states to pursue their ‘comparative advantage’. The difficulties of reforming global capitalism are due to economic competition between states as much as they are to capitalism as such, and to the inadequacy of global institutions to manage it in order to make equitable economic policy for the world.

‘World citizenship’ is still utopian, but it is no longer in the realm of science fiction or of idealist political theory. Today it seems to be directly related to quite practical questions of development. The idea of ‘world citizenship’ moves the whole debate about development from thinking in terms of charity to thinking in terms of justice. For ‘world citizens’, life-sapping poverty, appalling working and living conditions, and lack of hope for the future that is the experience of many people around the world becomes a matter of rights and responsibilities. The responsibility is ours: how do ‘we’ in over-developed states contribute in practice to securing human rights that really make a difference to people in other countries? Put like this, it may sound as if ‘rights’ is just a complication – it comes between ‘us’ – the comfortably off in rich countries - and ‘them’- the really poor in other countries. And it may even seem paternalist and disempowering: ‘we’ secure ‘their’ rights. Certainly, realizing human rights in practice is far from a simple matter. But what I think is implied in ‘world citizenship’ at the very least is that we have obligations to others as well as rights. Rights and responsibilities are two sides of the same coin in structures of global interdependence. It is in this sense that ‘world citizenship’ is close today – perhaps emerging already.

Background: Ageing, immunity and stresstolerance are inherent characteristics of all organisms. In animals, these traits are regulated, at least in part, by forkhead transcription factors in response to upstream signals from the Insulin/Insulin–like growth factor signalling (IIS) pathway. In the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, these phenotypes are molecularly linked such that activation of the forkhead transcription factor DAF-16 both extends lifespan and simultaneously increases immunity and stress resistance. It is known that lifespan varies significantly among the Caenorhabditis species but, although DAF-16 signalling is highly conserved, it is unclear whether this phenotypic linkage occurs in other species. Here we investigate this phenotypic covariance by comparing longevity, stress resistance and immunity in four Caenorhabditis species. Methodology/Principal Findings: We show using phenotypic analysis of DAF-16 influenced phenotypes that among four closely related Caenorhabditis nematodes, the gonochoristic species (Caenorhabditis remanei and Caenorhabditis brenneri) have diverged significantly with a longer lifespan, improved stress resistance and higher immunity than the hermaphroditic species (C. elegans and Caenorhabditis briggsae). Interestingly, we also observe significant differences in expression levels between the daf-16 homologues in these species using Real-Time PCR, which positively correlate with the observed phenotypes. Finally, we provide additional evidence in support of a role for DAF-16 in regulating phenotypic coupling by using a combination of wildtype isolates, constitutively active daf-16 mutants and bioinformatic analysis. Conclusions: The gonochoristic species display a significantly longer lifespan (p

This fully revised and updated introduction to political sociology incorporates the burgeoning literature on globalization and shows how contemporary politics is linked to cultural issues, social structure and democratizing social action.\ud \ud New material on global governance, human rights, global social movements, global media\ud New discussion of democracy and democratization\ud Clearly lays out what is at stake in deciding between alternatives of cosmopolitanism, imperialism and nationalism\ud Includes additional discussion of the importance of studying culture to political sociology

Cultural politics and global citizenship\ud ‘Make Poverty History’ was an extraordinary campaign: historically unprecedented, indeed impossible without the new structures of the emerging ‘cosmopolitanising state’, global in reach and yet national in focus. Studying the aims, means and achievements of Make Poverty History has much to teach us about the practical possibilities for a more cosmopolitan orientation to citizenship within and beyond national borders. As a campaign which took place not just through but in the media, investigating Make Poverty History is also important for media studies, enabling understanding of the importance of national media and popular culture to emergent possibilities of global citizenship.\ud Make Poverty History is the name given to the UK branch of a global alliance of NGOs co-ordinated by the Global Call to Action against Poverty to put pressure on the leaders of the richest countries to achieve the concrete, measurable Millennium Development Goals they’d already signed up to achieving. The Global Call to Action against Poverty had different names in different countries: ONE in US, ‘Plus d’Excuses!’ in France, Maak Het Waar in the Netherlands and so on. Although, as we shall see, Make Poverty History was very carefully managed as a media campaign, it was also genuinely grassroots insofar as it was led by a coalition of over 500 NGOs which receive their funding from donations and membership. They ranged from the large, international NGOs like Oxfam and Save the Children to smaller, often more radical organisations, like World Development Movement and Womankind. (Extract, 1st paragraph)

In this chapter I want briefly to explore how a critical Sociology of human rights might approach the question of how and why the proliferation of human rights discourse has not led, in general, to the more ethical treatment of human beings across the world. On the contrary, the ‘war on terror’ has made it very clear that states which have been central to supporting the expansion and deepening of human rights, and that apparently have a continuing commitment to the realisation of human rights norms, are themselves among the violators of human rights. Critical Sociologists should therefore consider the possibility that there are links between this proliferation of discourses on human rights and human rights violations.