Category Archives: Recent Publications

View book and article publications by political sociologists here

The Politics of Empowerment: Disability Rights and the Cycle of American Policy Reform

Posted on by

Pettinicchio, David. 2019. The Politics of Empowerment: Disability Rights and the Cycle of American Policy Reform. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press

Politics of Empowerment

Politics of Empowerment

Despite the progress of decades-old disability rights policy, including the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act, threats continue to undermine the wellbeing of this population. The U.S. is, thus, a policy innovator and laggard in this regard. In Politics of Empowerment, David Pettinicchio offers a historically grounded analysis of the singular case of U.S. disability policy, countering long-held views of progress that privilege public demand as its primary driver. By the 1970s, a group of legislators and bureaucrats came to act as “political entrepreneurs.” Motivated by personal and professional commitments, they were seen as experts leading a movement within the government. But as they increasingly faced obstacles to their legislative intentions, nascent disability advocacy and protest groups took the cause to the American people forming the basis of the contemporary disability rights movement. Drawing on extensive archival material, Pettinicchio redefines the relationship between grassroots advocacy and institutional politics, revealing a cycle of progress and backlash embedded in the American political system.

Dehumanization and the Normalization of Violence: It’s Not What You Think

Posted on by

Luft, Aliza. 2019. “Dehumanization and the Normalization of Violence: It’s Not What You Think.” Items: Insights from the Social Sciences blog.

 Aliza Luft tackles a question essential for social science and for human rights work—how, and how much, does dehumanizing propaganda spread by planners of genocide affect the “foot soldiers” of mass killings? Drawing on her own research on Rwanda as well as the Holocaust and other cases, Luft argues that the effects of pronouncements that describe potential victims as nonhuman or animals needs to be considered alongside other potential factors that motivate ordinary people to kill, and that the impact of such language is rarely straightforward. Luft concludes that “dehumanizing discourse can pave the way for violence to occur, but violence does not require it.”

The 3×1 Program for migrants and vigilante groups in contemporary Mexico

Posted on by

Clarisa Pérez-Armendáriz & Lauren Duquette-Rury. 2019. “The 3×1 Program for migrants and vigilante groups in contemporary Mexico.”Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2019.1623345

What explains the emergence of armed vigilante groups in Mexico over the past decade? This article links the recent emergence of armed vigilante organisations to United States-Mexico migration. Drawing on an original dataset collected from 2352 Mexican municipalities between 2002 and 2013, we find that a given community’s participation in programmes through which migrant organisations called hometown associations (HTAs) produce public goods in collaboration with sending state authorities is associated with a higher probability of observing an armed vigilante group. More specifically, armed vigilante groups are more likely to operate in those municipalities where HTAs repeatedly participate in the formal co-provision of public goods with government authorities. Contrary to our theoretical expectations, we also find that the presence of vigilante groups does not appear to be driven by HTA’s desire to protect their collective investments. We are not more likely to observe vigilante groups in those communities in which HTAs invest the most money. We argue that the positive relationship between frequent HTA participation in programmes where government authorities and migrants co-produce public goods obtains because the processes that this collaboration entails enable community members to act collectively to provide self-help forms of security and justice for their communities.

Racial Arithmetic: Ethnoracial Politics in a Relational Key

Posted on by

Rodríguez-Muñiz, Michael. 2019. “Racial Arithmetic: Ethnoracial Politics in a Relational Key.” Pp. 278-295 in Relational Formations of Race: Theory, Method and Practice, edited by Natalia Molina, Daniel Martinez HoSang, and Ramón Gutiérrez. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Societies invested in the quantification of race are rarely, if ever, free of racial arithmetic, that is, the practice of using statistics to legitimate and justify political decisions along categories of race and ethnicity. Despite this, scholars have tended to focus on the production rather than the use of ethnoracial statistics. This paper argues that the study of racial arithmetic—an understudied feature of contemporary politics—requires a relational approach. To illustrate the purchase of this approach, this paper presents an analysis of Chicago’s most recent bout of aldermanic redistricting. In this case, racial arithmetic rested on the ubiquitous juxtaposition of “Latino” and “Black” demographics, as captured in the 2010 census. By casting Black and Latinx political power as a zero-sum game, this juxtaposition helped longstanding white overrepresentation on the City Council escape public scrutiny.

New book on transnational governance through supply chains

Posted on by

Bartley, Tim. 2018. Rules without Rights: Land, Labor, and Private Authority in the Global Economy. Oxford University Press.

Rules without Rights coverActivists have exposed startling forms of labor exploitation and environmental degradation in global industries, leading many large retailers and brands to adopt standards for fairness and sustainability. This book is about the idea that transnational corporations can push these standards through their global supply chains, and in effect, pull factories, forests, and farms out of their local contexts and up to global best practices. For many scholars and practitioners, this kind of private regulation and global standard-setting can provide an alternative to regulation by territorially-bound, gridlocked, or incapacitated nation states, potentially improving environments and working conditions around the world and protecting the rights of exploited workers, impoverished farmers, and marginalized communities. But can private, voluntary standards actually create meaningful forms of regulation? Are forests and factories around the world actually being made into sustainable ecosystems and decent workplaces? Can global norms remake local orders?

This book provides striking new answers by comparing the private regulation of land and labor in democratic and authoritarian settings. Case studies of sustainable forestry and fair labour standards in Indonesia and China show not only how transnational standards are implemented ‘on the ground’ but also how they are constrained and reconfigured by domestic governance. Combining rich multi-method analyses, a powerful comparative approach, and a new theory of private regulation, Rules without Rights reveals the contours and contradictions of transnational governance.