Human Rights and Social Movements:
From the Boomerang Pattern to a Sandwich EffectKiyoteru Tsutsui and Jackie Smith
Word Count: 7447
Forthcoming in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, Edited byDavid A Snow, Sarah A. Soule, Hanspeter Kriesi, and Holly McCammon. Wiley
Blackwell.

Abstract
Human rights and social movements have long had mutually constitutive relationships
with each other, but scholarship that examines this link had been relatively slow todevelop. Since the late 1990s, however, social scientists in the United States haveproduced a growing body of literature on how social movements engage withinternational human rights institutions to advance their cause and form transnational
alliances. We examine this literature and offer future directions for this line of researchthat emphasize the importance of local-level organizing in sustaining the international
human rights system. We argue that institutional development in the past few decades has
consolidated global instruments and empowered local actors, such that what used to becalled a boomerang pattern of global institutions helping local activists with access has
now become more of a “sandwich effect,” with both global and local actors operating inconcert to promote human rights in the world.

Keywords

1

globalization, Civil Rights Movement, women’s rights, economic inequality,transnational social movements, movement actorhood, multinational corporations, civilsociety, international law, human rights city
Human rights and social movements have long had mutually constitutive relationships
with each other. Many social movements have promoted human rights causes
domestically and internationally since the late 18th century, elevating human rights to a
guiding principle in international politics. Collective political mobilizations challenging
torture, slavery, discrimination against women, and other repressive practices haveplayed critical roles in expanding “the universe of obligations” of governments across theglobe to ensure fundamental rights to every human being. Indeed, most observers pointout that social movement engagement was critical in institutionalizing universal humanrights principles into international declarations and treaties, despite resistance frompowerful states (Gaer 1996; Tsutsui, Whitlinger, and Lim 2012). Once established,international human rights institutions have contributed to diffusion of human rights ideas
the world over, and they have directly and indirectly empowered various local actors.
This has furthered collective mobilization around human rights and increased thechallenges to both national and international authorities. This growth in human rights
claims-making has, in turn, further enhanced the legitimacy of human rights across theglobe, inspiring even more social movements (Kaldor 2003).
Curiously, however, social scientists in the United States have been slow to focus
serious attention on this critical relationship between social movements and human rights
until recently. 1 On the one hand, social movement studies have long neglected the impact
of social movements on the rise of human rights in the contemporary world as well as the2influence of international human rights institutions on local activism. Focused almost
exclusively on domestic factors that shape national level political changes, social
movement scholars had failed to recognize the international dimensions of social
movements and the impact of collective popular challenges on global political dynamics
until the late 1990s.
On the other hand, scholarship on human rights has tended to focus more on theimpact of global human rights on state practices, seeing social movements, at best, as oneof the independent variables that shape policy outcomes. As a result, only a handful ofstudies on human rights examined the impact of global human rights on social
movements until the turn of the 21st century.
This cursory review of the literature points to a picture of two ships sailing pasteach other: social movement scholars overlooked the relationships between social
movements and the international human rights regime, and scholars of human rights
politics failed to fully recognize the impact social movements in human rights politics.
The vocabulary these scholars typically use is indicative of these tendencies. Social
movement scholars are much more likely to discuss specific rights issues such as civilrights and women’s rights, those issues that became prominent in domestic politics in the
United States. Human rights scholars tend to call social movements by different names
such as NGOs, civil society actors, and human rights defenders, signaling their focus on
broader constituencies that support the principle of human rights and shape policy
outcomes. The existence of social movements in itself is not of high relevance to them,and only when activists have an impact on policy outcomes do they pay attention tosocial movements.

3Considering how intertwined these two political concepts are in reality, it ispuzzling how long it took for scholars to draw a tight connection between the two. One
main reason for this is the timing of the rise of human rights in the contemporary world
and that of the development of social movement research.
Human rights became a vocabulary for political mobilization in the post-WorldWar II era. Initially, core international human rights documents such as the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the International Covenant on Civil and Political
Rights (ICCPR), and the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights(ICESCR) were leveraged for self-determination in independence movements in Asia andAfrica and autonomous regions in developed countries. Perhaps this is not surprising,considering that the first article of both the ICCPR and the ICESCR refers to the right ofself-determination. The early U.S. Civil Rights Movement also embraced human rights
language in its early stages, and activists such as Fannie Lou Hamer used the UDHR in
her organizing work. In the late 1940s and early 50s, the NAACP and its precursor
organization brought the “We Charge Genocide” petition to the United Nations.
However, the leaders of the Movement soon chose civil rights framing instead, fearingthat the language of human rights, with its association with social and economic rights
pushed by the Eastern bloc, would doom the movement to failure (Anderson 2003). Thus,in the few decades after the end of World War II, international human rights instruments
were used more for developing countries’ mobilization for independence, and Cold War
dynamics led many social movements in the West to distance themselves from humanrights language.

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Human rights gained traction for more reform-oriented social movements in the
1970s (Moyn 2010). Many movements have emerged since then to leverage expanding
global human rights principles and instruments, making the relationship between humanrights and social movements a more viable topic of research. Studies on social
movements developed around the same time, since the late 1970s. However, fromCharles Tilly’s classic work in the late 1970s to the crystallization of the “holy trinity” ofpolitical opportunities, resource mobilization, and framing by the early 1990s, their focus
has been on domestic political environments. The paradigm case of this scholarship has
been the Civil Rights Movement. This influenced the analytical focus of this line ofresearch, delaying attention to the broader influence of human rights on social
movements. 2
Scholars of human rights – particularly those in law and political science, whodominated early scholarship on human rights – focused on policy outcomes and legal
decisions, viewing social movements as nothing more than an intervening variable. They
did not examine social movements as the main object of their research, thus neglecting
the causal connection between global human rights and local activism.
For those reasons, scholarship that explicitly links human rights and social
movements developed surprisingly late, in the late 1990s. The next section reviews thisliterature, followed in the subsequent section by examination of recent trends andsuggestions for productive future directions in these lines of research.

Key Insights in the Research on Human Rights and Social Movements

5Studies that focus on the interplay between global human rights and social movements
emerged in the late 1990s, when Keck and Sikkink (1998) examined how local activists
use international human rights norms and institutions to advance their movements, andSmith, Chatfield, and Pagnucco (1997) studied how transnational social movements
leverage human rights in their campaigns for social justice that target international
institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank. Since then, many empirical studies
have documented (1) how local activists strategically adopt global human rights ideas andinstruments to advance their cause and (2) how they form transnational coalitions tochallenge international authorities. We examine these two types of global-local interface
separately.
Local adoption of global human rights and its transformative impact: First,
research on how local actors use global human rights institutions for their local goals has
identified some recurring factors that correspond to the three key dimensions in social
movement studies – political opportunities, resource mobilization, and framing(McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald 1996). First, international human rights forums, such as
the UN Human Rights Committee and the European Court of Human Rights, provide
disadvantaged groups with new opportunities for claims-making (see Chapter 1 onpolitical opportunities), thus enabling boomerang patterns by which repressed local actors
go to international forums to gain leverage against their government (Keck and Sikkink
1998). These international forums exert varying levels of pressures on local authorities toaddress human rights problems, ranging from naming-and-shaming to legally binding
decisions. Second, international flows of mobilizing resources reach far corners of theworld and facilitate collective action by marginalized populations (see Chapter 4 on

6

resources). These resources include material aid such as foundation grants and Official
Development Assistance that typically flow from developed to developing countries.
Human resources also play important roles, as activists, journalists, and researchers visit
vulnerable communities the world over to offer advice on how to stage effective politicalmobilization and to expose local human rights violations. Third, symbols andvocabularies that carry international currency can become useful tools in framing
movement goals. In their efforts to legitimate movements, activists often draw oninternational human rights documents and framing used in other successful movements.
Such framing efforts often help in publicizing human rights violations and in making thecase that the relevant authorities need to correct injustices(see Chapter 21 on framing).
In sum, global human rights institutions assist local social movements (1) bycreating new political opportunities at the international level that enable local actors toexert external pressures on local authorities, (2) by increasing international flows ofmaterial and human resources for political mobilization, and (3) by providing frames forsocial movements that appeal to and engage international audiences and local publics(Tsutsui 2006; Tsutsui and Shin 2008). These three dimensions offer a useful framework
for analyzing the impact of global factors on local social movements.
There is a fourth dimension that has only recently received attention from scholars
in this area, the construction of movement actorhood by global human rights. Because
most earlier studies (e.g. Keck and Sikkink 1998; Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink 1999) took asgiven the activists’ perspectives, interests, and goals, they failed to examine how global
human rights have the capacity to form and reconstitute local movement actorhood, a7subject position through which social movement actors engage in collective mobilization
for social change. 3 They typically assumed that social movement actors are bounded
entities with clearly defined goals seeking to leverage global opportunities, resources, andvocabularies for their gains. Seeing global human rights simply as a means to pre-definedends, they overlooked how global human rights can shape movement actorhood itself andcircumscribe how actors interpret their social and political world, formulate theirapproaches, and carry out their concrete actions. 4
Recent studies have paid more attention to constitutive effects of global humanrights on movement actorhood. Merry (2006) is one of the earliest studies to examine theimpact of global human rights on local actors’ subject position. She argues that womentake on a new subjectivity when they invoke international law on women’s rights. Rosen
and Yoon (2009) also examine the emergence of new subject position among New York
City activists as they incorporated an international women’s rights discourse, thereby
forging a new counter-hegemonic space. The primary focus of these studies, however, ison negotiations between global law and local cultures and how local actors“vernacularize” or adapt and adopt international ideas, exercising their agency, rather
than how the latter transforms the former. Tsutsui (2017) is the first to explicitly theorize
the transformative impact of global human rights on local actors. Drawing on the multiinstitutional politics approach of Armstrong and Bernstein (2008), he examines howchanging understandings about their position in local society and their entitled rights
galvanized minority activism in Japan, leading to greater activities and subsequent
successes.

8These four dimensions of the global-local interplay do not necessarily exhaust
how human rights impact social movements, but should be the first step in future studiesof this kind. A second line of research on the global-local interplay examines theformation of transnational social movements. These movements challenge international
authorities to change their operations and, as such, are distinct from local activism that
pursues local goals.
Transnational social movements targeting global authorities: As noted above,
much research on social movements in the United States has not been attentive to theways social movements cross national boundaries and/or engage in political activities
outside the formal jurisdictions of national governments. Thus, until the late 1990s there
was little attention to transnational dimensions of social movements (See Chapter 6 ontransnational contexts). At that time, more social movements were beginning to develop
formal organizations and informal connections that crossed national boundaries, and they
were encouraged and supported by the proliferation of technologies that facilitatedtransnational communication and exchange as well as by a series of UN-sponsoredGlobal Conferences on issues such as the environment, human rights, women, and social
development. Smith’s research documents a rapid proliferation of formally organizedtransnational social movement organizations (TSMOs) beginning in the late 1980s andcontinuing until the turn of the 21st century (Smith 2008; Smith and Wiest 2012).
Noteworthy here is the fact that human rights TSMOs are the most numerous in thispopulation, comprising roughly a third of all TSMOs. Moreover, over time we see
growing numbers of TSMOs adopting multi-issue frames that combine human rights
claims with, for instance, concerns for environmental protection or the transformation of9the global economy. Qualitative research links such shifts to the end of the Cold War andto the expansion of dialogues among activists from the global North and South and froma diverse array of class and social positions (e.g., Vargas 2003; Rothman and Oliver
1999; Moghadam 2012). In addition, experiences in global settings changed activists’analyses of global problems and their understandings of the inter-state system, leading toshifts in organizing strategies and emphases.
Qualitative research further shows that recent decades have brought a dramatic
expansion of “translocal” networks of activists who deploy varied strategies of engaging
global human rights frameworks in local struggles (see, e.g., Desai 2015). Technologicaldevelopments that facilitate transnational communication as well as the development andlearning of transnational organizing strategies and capacities contribute to thepossibilities for local activists to draw from and connect with the broader global networkof human rights advocates. Globally, organizations and campaigns have been working tobetter connect local needs and priorities with global strategies. Thus, the World Social
Forum process, which emerged in 2001 as part of the global protests resisting economic
globalization, has inspired and helped connect local, national and regional movements
and to connect global analyses with local struggles (see, e.g., Smith et al. 2011; Sen
2007). It is important to note here that these movements do not simply seek to advancetheir local goals but place their issues in the context of global challenges, and advocate
for global solutions to these problems, targeting global institutions.
An important theme that is apparent when considering the ways activists haveengaged global human rights discourse and institutions is that there is a more coherent
critique of the incompatibilities between global financial institutions such as the World10

Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund andinternational human rights. Activists from the global South especially have been
demanding formal recognition and protection of the “right to development,” andeconomic, cultural and social rights more generally, as they have resisted the abuses
stemming from the growing power of transnational corporations and global finance(Smith 2008; Pleyers 2011). More recently, activists have come together across Northand South to demand protection from growing threats to basic human needs such as food,water, and housing (e.g., McMichael 2015; Harvey 2012). As we discuss below, since the1990s and especially in the 2000s, more activists are coming together to demand “theright to the city,” that is, they are challenging conventional notions of citizenship based innational identities and individual property ownership and proposing that the city is themore appropriate unit for their commitment and organizing efforts (Holston 2009).

New Trends and Future Directions
The assumption in much of these studies has been that local actors receive help frominternational actors and institutions to achieve their goals. The boomerang pattern, as
identified by Keck and Sikkink, symbolizes this dynamic: deprived of means to challenge
authorities locally, actors appeal to international society to produce a boomerang effect ofinternational authorities pressuring local power holders for desired changes. Similarly,transnational social movements target powerful international organizations so thatinternational authorities would change their policies, which should subsequently alleviate
human rights violations in many localities. It is also important to note that this process is11beneficial for local activists to the extent the international institutions are effective andnational governments are responsive to international pressures.
Recently, questions about the efficacy of the international human rights regime
have intensified, leading some to claim the “twilight” or “endtimes” of human rights(Hopgood 2013; Posner 2014). These observers question the capacity of international
human rights institutions to exert real changes in the face of growing opposition by state
governments. They also express concerns about global actors’ lack of sensitivity to local
cultural practices in trying to implement reform. In response to these concerns, two
aspects of the interaction between human rights and social movements call for more
attention.
Feedback from local activism to global human rights institutions: First, global
institutions do not stand on thin air, and they need constant reinforcement by local andother actors. Existing studies tend to take both the national state and international humanrights institutions as given, and they treat the global-local interaction as a unidirectional
process whereby the global shapes the local. That is, many studies on global human rights
examine how, and to what extent, international human rights treaties and organizations
impact local politics, seeing the global and national entities as preexisting and selfsustaining, with little need for local actors’ contributions. In practice, both national andinternational institutions are shaped by interactions among diverse actors working at
multiple scales. In many cases human rights movements have been the prime movers
working to advance both human rights treaties and institutional innovations that improve
compliance (Gaer 1996; Sikkink 2011; Smith 2008; Tsutsui, Whitlinger, and Lim 2012).
Prior research and experience shows that effective implementation of human rights norms

12requires more than just treaties and implementing bodies. It is essential to also haveengaged actors working at local and trans-local scales who are capable of monitoring
human rights practices and holding local and national officials accountable to humanrights commitments (Hafner-Burton and Ron 2009; Hafner-Burton and Tsutsui 2005;
Simmons 2009; Smith-Cannoy 2012).
From the abolitionist, anti-slavery campaign (Martinez 2012) – arguably the first
truly transnational movement for human rights – through the adoption of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights (Glendon 2001), to more recent norms about specifichuman rights issues such as the Apartheid (Klotz 1995; Soule 2009), torture and forced
disappearance (Brysk 1994; Mendez 2011), female genital mutilation (Boyle 2002;
Shannon 2012) and discrimination based on descent (Tsutsui 2017), local actors’commitment to problematize and publicize the issues globally and to establish aninternational understanding about prohibited human rights violations has been thefoundation that sustained the edifice of international human rights institutions. With
support from officials of international organizations and sympathetic governments, civilsociety actors’ tireless efforts have reinforced and expanded the international humanrights regime. For instance, within the past few decades, we have seen the introduction of
new institutional mechanisms—all resulting from movement initiatives—that
strengthened human rights monitoring and implementation, including the UN Office ofthe High Commissioner for Human Rights, the International Criminal Court, the UN
Permanent Forum of Indigenous Issues, UN Women, and the reorganized Human Rights
Council with a new potentially powerful mechanism called the Universal Periodic
Review. Despite persistent challenges, each of these innovations represents a significant

13

step that alters the relative power of states against human rights claims by civil society
actors.
Nevertheless, in the current political environment—marked by economic andenvironmental instability and the rise of right-wing parties and leaders across the world—
we are seeing critical challenges to the international human rights architecture. In part,
this may result from the effects of globalization on reducing the governing capacities ofnational states and expanding the power of transnational corporations. States are assumed
to be the legally accountable parties to international human rights law. However, global
economic integration has reduced states’ ability to ensure the economic and other humanrights of their citizens. At the same time, powerful states like the United States andtransnational corporations have gained extraordinary influence over the day-to-day
experiences of many people around the world, while being much less directly
accountable to existing international human rights treaties. This creates a crisis for humanrights institutions as well as for many national states, whose very legitimacy rests upon
the premise (and promise) of human rights (Gibney 2008). As the Brexit and the new
regime in the United States threaten the foundations of multilateralism itself, thisinstitutional crisis is especially problematic. The impressive gains that various local andtransnational actors have made in the past few decades are under threat in the current
political environment, reminding us of the need for social movement actors to continue tosupport the international human rights system.
Local initiatives at the municipal level: Second, the limited effectiveness ofinternational human rights institutions for improving local human rights practices hashelped fuel the more recent expansion of local initiatives to implement global ideals at14

the local municipal level. Frustrated by national governments’ lack of responsiveness toresidents’ concerns about both economic, social and cultural as well as political and civilrights, activists have been working to hold local authorities accountable for human rights
protections. For their part, cities are finding that neoliberal economic policies have leftthem with insufficient resources to address growing demands in conventional ways, andmunicipal authorities have increasingly come together in attempts to respond to thesechallenges (Barber 2013). Factors such as growing urban populations, inequality, interurban competition for investment, and declining national government support for social
welfare have made cities the sites of a growing global wave of place-based human rights
claims-making. This trend first appeared in the global South, and in particular in Latin
America in the 1990s and has expanded to countries of the global North during the 2000s(Holston 2009; Harvey 2012; Chueca 2016). In response to the need to maintain local
political and social stability, cities are finding it in their interest to champion humanrights that national governments do not necessarily support, such as the rights of
undocumented residents. In the United States, a national movement for “Sanctuary
Cities” has emerged to support local protections for undocumented immigrants, defying
federal government efforts to detain and deport non-citizens. The U.S. Conference ofMayors recently endorsed both the International Coalition of Cities Against Racism andthe Cities for CEDAW campaign.
The “Cities for CEDAW” campaign is a locally-based human rights initiative in
the United States that seeks to advance international protections for women that havebeen stalled by the U.S. government’s failure to ratify the Convention on the Eliminationof All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). This campaign has sought to15

effectively realize the CEDAW convention by convincing municipal authorities to adopt
local CEDAW ordinances. Effectively, this would produce a “bottom-up” ratification
process whereby mobilization in local communities produces national compliance with
global human rights norms. To date there are six cities that have formally adopted local
CEDAW ordinances, and more than fifty cities are currently working towards this goal. 5
As activists from different localities have come together in transnationalorganizational networks and in physical spaces like the World Social Forums, we haveseen increasing coherence of what is being called the “right to the city” or the humanrights cities movement (Mayer 2012; Oomen et al. 2016). Instead of working to target
national governments or international institutions, more human rights activists aremobilizing at local levels to help realize human rights in local communities. Starting withthe grounded experiences of urban residents, they are demanding that cities formallyrecognize and take steps to protect basic rights such as the right to affordable housing,racial justice, clean water, a healthy environment, and living wages. They are engaging
with international human rights machinery such as the Inter-American Court of Human
Rights, the UN’s Universal Periodic Review process, the Convention Against Torture,and the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination. 6 In somecities, residents are forming diverse coalitions to press municipal leaders to make formal
commitments to becoming “human rights cities,” and to date more than thirty such cities
exist. 7
A “human rights city” is a municipality that refers explicitly to the UDHR andother international human rights standards and/or law in their formal charters, policies,
statements, and programs. Analysts have observed growing numbers of such cities since16

2000 (Grigolo, 2011, van den Berg and Oomen, 2014). Some human rights cities
incorporate a particular set of human rights into their formal governing agenda, such as
San Francisco’s 1999 ordinance implementing the Convention on the Elimination ofDiscrimination Against Women or Barcelona’s anti-discrimination and immigrant rights
programs. Other cities have explicitly designated themselves as human rights cities,
indicating a commitment to moving towards the realization of the broad array of humanrights. The Human Rights Cities initiative was launched by the Peoples Decade on
Human Rights Learning (PDHRE) following the UN Human Rights Conference inVienna in 1993. The group defined a Human Rights City as:a city or a community where people of good will, in government, in organizations
and in institutions, try and let a human rights framework guide the development of
the life of the community. Equality and nondiscrimination are basic values.
Efforts are made to promote a holistic vision of human rights to overcome fear
and impoverishment, a society that provides human security, access to food, cleanwater, housing, education, healthcare and work at livable wages, sharing theseresources with all citizens—not as a gift, but as a realization of human rights. 8

Key elements of the strategy outlined by PDHRE organizers include extensive efforts at
popular education known as “human rights learning” and a commitment to broad popularparticipation in shaping and monitoring policies, typically through a Human Rights
Steering Committee. Organizers are explicit in pointing out that cultural change isessential to advancing human rights, and it is not enough simply to change the laws.
17

PDHRE leader Shulamith Koenig has worked directly with local organizers to help themdevelop human rights city initiatives, and the group also promotes the initiative at theWorld Social Forums and in other movement venues, encouraging and providing
resources for activists to re-imagine the cities in which they live. Rosario, Argentina
became the first human rights city of this kind in 1997. 9
In addition to local initiatives, there has been growing momentum among local
human rights leaders to expand and strengthen horizontal networking across Human
Rights Cities in the United States and internationally. For instance, municipal leaders in
Europe began meeting in 1998 as part of a conference on “Cities for Human Rights,”
organized to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights. This meeting generated a series of bi-annual meetings and the European Charterfor Safeguarding Human Rights in the City, which now has over 400 municipal parties. 10
The Forum of Local Authorities convened local authorities alongside the World Social
Forum since 2001, debating a draft text of a World Charter of the Right to the City

(Oomen and Baumgärtel 2012:6). In mid-2016, activists working in the U.S. Human
Rights Network have formed a National Human Rights Cities Network to organize
periodic gatherings of human rights city organizers and to document and share bestpractices and models for implementing local human rights initiatives. 11 And following
the electoral success of right-wing candidates in the United States and elsewhere, more
analysts and activists are recognizing the significance of cities as sites for human rights
mobilization (see, e.g., Barber 2016; Baird and Hughes 2016).
This shift in momentum of human rights organizing from global to local levels
might be seen as reflecting the limitations and failures of the neoliberal globalization18

project and its institutions. As national governments have shifted more attention andauthority to international economic and political institutions, they have undermined theirown authority and redirected it both upward to inter-governmental institutions like the
UN and World Trade Organization, outward to corporations (through privatization), anddownward to cities and local regions (Markoff 1999). Meanwhile, economic
globalization has contributed to rising inequality and the emergence of urban centers thathave fueled the key processes driving global finance and trade, changing both the natureof state authority and its long-term viability under neoliberalism (Sassen 1991; 2014). As
national and global institutions have failed to address increasingly urgent global crises
such as climate change, rising inequality, and growing insecurity in regard to access tofood and other basic needs, activists in local communities have responded by putting
forward new strategies for addressing such needs.

Conclusion

Our review of international human rights movements shows the dynamic relationships
between social movements and formal institutions and between local and global politicalarenas in the work of advancing human rights. Despite some setbacks and the potentiallychallenging years ahead, international human rights institutions continue to operate tosupport local struggles for better human rights practices. The institutional scaffolding isquite strong for many international bodies, and despite some potential trends for deinstitutionalization – such as in defections from the International Criminal Court by a few
African countries –, the Human Rights Council and many treaty monitoring bodies have19

been working steadily to promote and protect human rights. The recent research we
examined here suggests that we will see a growing collection of locally organized andhorizontally networked actors helping constitute a changing global human rights
movement that once took a more international and national organizational arrangement.
Thus, what we see in contemporary society is a shift from a reliance on top-down
globally initiated changes for human rights protection to a combination of bottom-up andtop-down efforts. On the one hand, global level efforts that seek to generate pressure on
national governments continue, even if they are limited largely to naming and shaming
and lack enforcement mechanisms. On the other hand, bottom-up mobilizations at local,
even municipal levels, focus on translating global norms into local practices, producing
more immediate small scale changes with a view to accumulating these changes acrossdifferent locales to achieve global level transformation. In this way a “doubleboomerang” pattern continues to be one part of contemporary relationships between
human rights and social movements, whereby local agents’ appeals to international
human rights law both strengthen local leverage and enhance the practical impacts andlegitimacy of international human rights law (Kaldor 2003). We believe that what we arewitnessing here might be described as a “sandwich effect,” whereby global institutions’pressures from above and grassroots mobilization from below combine to increase thepressure on national governments as well as transnational corporations and someintergovernmental organizations to comply with and advance human rights norms.
The bottom up mobilizations grew ever stronger because of decades of efforts byinternational organizations to both define and strengthen international human rights
machinery and to build the capacities and translocal networks of local actors. To that20

extent, it is also important to recognize the importance of the transformative effects ofhuman rights ideas not only in shaping the international institutional arena but also inconstituting movement actorhood. These effects might not be captured in measurable
ways in quantitative analyses, but they have raised the potential for local actors tochallenge authorities at local levels and sustain global efforts for social change. After
decades of global ideas and institutions empowering local actors, the local actors havedeveloped new understandings of how local conditions are shaped by global forces, andthey have developed broad and deep networks of translocal ties that significantly enhancetheir capacity to support global human rights institutions and to influence local andnational governments.

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Biography
Kiyoteru Tsutsui is Associate Professor and Associate Chair of Sociology, Director of
the Donia Human Rights Center, and Director of the Center for Japanese Studies at the28University of Michigan. His mixed-methods research on the interaction between global
human rights and local politics has appeared in American Journal of Sociology, American
Sociological Review, and other journals, and his recent book is Corporate Social
Responsibility in a Globalizing World (2015, co-edited with Alwyn Lim).

Jackie Smith is Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh and editor of
the Journal of World-Systems Research. Her books include Social Movements andWorld-System Transformation (2017, co-edited with Michael Goodhart, Patrick Manning,and John Markoff) and Social Movements in the World-System: The Politics of Crisis andTransformation (2012, with Dawn Wiest). She coordinates the Human Rights City
Alliance in Pittsburgh and is on the National Human Rights Cities Network steeringcommittee.

1 Our review covers the perspective from U.S. sociology of social movements literature, which differs fromthat emerging from other national and regional contexts and from other sub-fields, such as world-systems
analysis and the sociology of race and ethnicity. In particular, this tradition tends to be U.S.-centric andguilty of “methodological nationalism,” if not American exceptionalism. Because social movements tend to
cross national and other boundaries and defy researchers’ categories of issue-focus, insider/outsider
politics, formal vs. informal organization, prevailing conceptual schemes often obscure the complex waysthat people engage in the work of social change. For instance, social movement literature distinguishes
movements such as LGBTQ rights, women’s rights, labor rights, anti-poverty, and racial or environmental
justice as separate movements, whereas in reality they all advance human rights claims in some form.
Many are also tied to varying degrees with regional or global networks, whether or not studies focusing on
their national or local activities are able to see those connections. Alongside growing connections anddialogue across the global North and South in both movements and in the academy, we are seeing a greater

29

appreciation for the ways prevailing epistemologies impact our understandings of the world and especiallyof the emancipatory movements operating outside hegemonic logics (see Conway 2017; Dalsheim 2017).
2 Partial correctives to this emerged in the late 1990s as Layton (2000) and McAdam’s revised version of

the classic (1999) acknowledged the influence of the Cold War politics and human rights language on the
Civil Rights Movement.
3 The concept, movement actorhood, has a good deal of affinity with the more frequently used term,

identity. Reflecting the primary focus of early social movement research, identity is often used in thecontext of examination of what level of collective identity is needed for social movements to emerge (foran excellent recent review, see Snow and Corrigall-Brown 2015). This led to research focus on how ashared sense of “we-ness” can be created among relevant actors, what kinds of symbols facilitate thisprocess, what types of collective identities are more likely to enable mobilization and under what contexts,
and other questions that focus on movement emergence. While sympathetic to this approach, scholars who
examine movement actorhood demonstrate a greater interest in movement goals and strategies and how
actor’s subject positions guide them, reflecting the multi-institutional politics approach (Armstrong andBernstein 2008). The use of this term is also a response to the call by Brubaker and Cooper (2000) to moveaway from “identity” and use more precise terms; identity has been overloaded as an analytical concept
because scholars use them to refer to three related but different social processes – (1) identification andcategorization, (2) self-understanding and social location, and (3) commonality, connectedness, andgroupness –, and movement actorhood is primarily about the second category, actors’ self-understanding
about their place in society (Tsutsui 2017).
4 To be sure, social movement scholars have examined local actors’ orientations, motivations, and identities

in great detail (Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta 2001; Polletta 1998; Polletta and Jasper 2001). Such studies,
however, largely overlook the impact of global factors, focusing instead on the influence of the state and/orinteractions among movement actors.
5 http://citiesforcedaw.org/
6 The US Human Rights Network is a leading example of a national social movement organization thathelps translate international human rights into local settings by, for instance, helping bring grassroots
activists to official international human rights meetings to testify about local conditions and by assembling30

information from local activists as part of the civil society “shadow reports” filed in international bodies aspart of official reviews of U.S. compliance with international human rights obligations (See, e.g.,
http://ushrnetwork.org/).
7 Scholarly research and formal documentation of these activist initiatives is limited, given their dispersion

and localized nature. However, Smith has been part of a growing network of activists, human rights
lawyers, and scholars working to document and advance new thinking about these local initiatives. Alongwith students, Smith helped draft the Wikipedia entry on Human Rights Cities,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Rights_City.
8 http://pdhre.org/achievements-HR-cities-mar-07.pdf
9 For more details about human rights cities, see, e.g., Marks, Modrowski, and Lichem (2008), Oomen,

David, and Grigolo (2016), and Smith, (forthcoming).
10 http://www.uclg-cisdp.org/en/right-to-the-city/european-charter.
11 http://www.ushrnetwork.org/our-work/project/national-human-rights-city-network31