A small island nation near Australia was invaded and occupied by the Indonesian military regime in 1975, which lasted until 1999. This dissertation examines the global solidarity movement, whose success was due to the skill of its leaders, the collective agency transnational mobilization, effective social movement framing, which helped to create, act upon, and transform important critical junctures throughout the conflict. The East Timorese resistance movement against the Indonesian occupation took an ethnically and politically fragmented society and transformed it into a powerful transnational resistance movement that brough together military, clandestine, diplomatic, and global civil society actors together in supporting East Timor’s right to self-determination. Social movement frames punctuate the severity, immorality, and injustice of conditions. However, existing accounts on claims-making, framing trajectories, and outcomes tend to downplay the influence of contingency and indeterminacy in social movements. Indeed, as social constructionists contend, collective constructions are historically produced and culturally contingent. As claims-makers advance public claims developed within institutional realities, this underscores the range of contingencies and uncertainties actors manage in mobilizing their agendas. With East Timor's case, this sandwich thesis contends that understanding social movement framing and trajectories requires keeping institutional, discursive, and geopolitical contexts intact. Movements are embedded in histories, institutions, or fields that shape the outcome of framing trajectories and the outcome of social movement claims-making. However, social constructionists help us understand that resources, frames, and opportunities are perceived and constructed by actors. Therefore, the theoretical perspective provides substantial credence to the roles of contingency and human agency in social movement mobilization. Ultimately, objective structures, such as political/discursive opportunities or legal texts, are not enabling but generate social movement action insofar as moral agents perceive them. Often, this work is discursively constructed. This reality underscores the dimension of contingency in social action and social movement framing and mobilization because objective structures do not automatically determine what actors will select as a specific course of collective action or framing strategies. Frame and framing trajectories are particular to, and instantiated in, the contexts and develop over time as moral agents mobilize meaning by interacting with targets, sensitive to local conditions, emergent contingencies, and competing interests. By focusing on the social framing process, I show how framing or collective action frames emerge and are diffused in different ways across national contexts. The emphasis is not to address the broader institutionalized logics, such as political/discursive opportunities and geopolitics, but to understand how these aspects are incorporated in the framing practices of moral agents as strategic action as “endogenous to a field of actors” (Lounsbury et al., 2003:72), whose interests and national, not only transnational, but embeddedness also influence the interactional dynamics of their framing actions and trajectories. In this way, framing practices can be understood as struggles over audiences' minds and hearts, where actors compete in moral politics to secure symbolic power and political legitimacy. The macro-level logic indeed impacts the structure of frames. The diffusion and acceleration of claims within historically contingent events depend simultaneously on pre-existing, strong cultural framing and an influential social movement culture rooted in the abstract ideals of human rights that are transnationally dispersed but integrated. Strategic framing choices depend on various logic. Firstly, expanding political and discursive opportunities is crucial in accelerating mobilization. Moreover, the diffusion of frames and public claims can further propel mobilization and help to build convergences across sociopolitical allies. Agency and structure are often interpenetrating. Namely, depending on the choices made by actors at specific ‘critical junctures,’ they can either propel the social force of mobilization or hamper it, depending on perceived choices (agency). Social movements, especially transnational advocacy networks, prove more effective in frame diffusion when they build solidarities around shared meaning and international norms (human rights) that allow them to converge effectively around shared purposes and sustain collective mobilization across extended periods. Transnational networks of solidarity (the global solidarity movement) harnessed collective mobilization at the global level by converging the diffusion of their frames and claims around human rights talk. The thesis also considers various logics such as path dependency, contingency, historical events, and geopolitics in shaping the national and global movement mobilization and claims-making field. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Human Rights Due Diligence is a key topic in the debates among human rights advocates and the business world. Its understanding varies from a standard ofexpected care to a process to manage business risks. As introduced in the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, it is a process through which business enterprises should identify, assess and properly address human rights risks. Today, the concept is used or tends to be incorporated in avariety of legal instruments, from international soft-law to regional and national regulations. However, the understanding of what is the objective of human rights due diligence, its content, and the required standard still vary. Relying on the international soft-law instruments and the developments in national law, this study analyzes the foundation and narrative of human rights due diligence, content, common elements, and scope of obligation in a way to identify similarities and/or differences in the concept within different jurisdictions.

No / The federal government under Cardoso was not ideologically committed to the adoption of specific "neoliberal" policies in the field of crime control and criminal justice through the reform of the courts, the police, and the prison system. Its failure to curtail institutionally driven human rights violations resulted from a more diffuse "environmental" effect of neoliberalism whereby fiscal management concerns monopolized the government's economic and political capital and from structural constraints on domestic political and governance configurations such as federalism and the character of the Ministry of Justice. Penal policy in Brazil, as elsewhere, was incoherent and volatile because of the confluence of two distinct political ideologies, economic neoliberalism and social neoconservatism, with the federal government pursuing strategies of delegation and denial. Policy transfer and norm convergence were affected positively by the international human rights regime and its domestic allies and negatively by local moral conservatives and producer groups acting as policy blockers rather than entrepreneurs.

The concept of sovereignty has been a contestable idea throughout history, and its meaning has oftentimes transformed to reflect prevailing systemic conditions and political priorities of major actors in each historical period. In this study, I argue that the social construction of state sovereignty is at the beginning stages of another major redefinition. In an era of globalization and regional integration, discourse on sovereignty has become increasingly prolific as the rhetoric of sovereignty moves away from Westphalian principles that were based exclusively on the agency of independent states. Furthermore, multinational campaigns to promote international human rights engender a discourse that suggests the idea of sovereignty is changing. Does this emerging discourse confirm the growing legitimacy of humanitarian intervention, or is it merely a discursive trend in international relations that does not indicate significant change in state perception and behavior? The purpose of this work is to address this question. / Master of Arts

The establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC) through the signing of the Rome Statute in July, 1998 created the first permanent criminal court under international law. The Court stands in stark contrast to previous international criminal tribunals not simply because of its permanent nature, but also because it places the individual, not states, responsible under international law. It is, however, this independent, permanent nature of the Court which sparked fears within the society of states that the Court may in some manner serve to erode the state sovereignty. The purpose of this work is to address this basic concern. The aim of the work is to address the concept of sovereignty by first examining standard perceptions of sovereignty and then to move the discussion into an institutionalist construction of the term. Once accomplished, I then apply a set of criteria for evaluating sovereignty to the basic structures of the ICC in order to explore what the potential impact of the ICC may be on the institution of state sovereignty. In the end, I find that the institution of sovereignty is not threatened by the presence of the Court. In fact, the institution of sovereignty may be in some ways bolstered by the Court in that the Court embodies a new set of principals with regards to the appropriate relationship between the state and the individual. / Master of Arts

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This report explores and questions the history of human rights rhetoric through the 18th century anti-slave trade poem of Hannah More, Slavery, a poem. Hannah More used the term ‘human rights’ more than 150 years before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Nevertheless, when historians and political scientists track the history of human rights, it is frequently presented as “from Locke through Paine” as part of a narrative of the “coming of age” of democracy in a longer quest for rights stemming from 18th century revolutions and radicalism. This report looks instead at the episodic nature of human rights rhetoric through 18th century ideas of the human. As argued here, More’s use of the term ‘human rights’ indicates an attempt to reconcile the tension between Enlightenment and Christian discourses to promote the anti-slave trade cause. / text

This thesis addresses the meaning and scope of application of the right not to be subjected to degrading treatment, a distinct form of harm within the absolute prohibition of torture, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment under Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Through an interpretive case-law analysis, the thesis presents a deeper conceptual understanding of the meaning of degrading treatment than is found in existing human rights literature. It is a central argument of this thesis that the concept of human dignity occupies a key position in the interpretation of degrading treatment adopted by the European Court of Human Rights. Consequently, it is argued that the meaning of human dignity in this context ‘frames’ the potential boundaries of the right. The thesis aims to facilitate identification of situations that may convincingly be argued to amount to potential instances of degrading treatment through generating a richer appreciation of the right’s proper scope of concern. A comprehensive account of the meaning of degrading treatment and corresponding state obligations is offered. This account provides a framework for future application of the right that is both practical and plausible.

It is assumed that democratic policing will help to improve the respect of human rights and democracy in a given country. Using secondary data, this study explores cross-nationally the interrelation between democratic policing practices (e.g., community policing) and democracy and human rights.The results show significant positive correlation between the practice of democratic policing and indicators of democracy and respect for human rights. The analysis strongly implies that scholars have underestimated the power of policing institutions in democratic societies.

This dissertation is a cross-national investigation of the relationship between cultural heterogeneity and regimes' respect for basic human rights. The quantitative human rights literature has not yet addressed the question of whether high levels of cultural diversity are beneficial or harmful. My research addresses this gap. I address the debate between those who argue that diversity is negatively related to basic human rights protection and those who argue it is likely to improve respect for these rights. Ultimately, I propose that regimes in diverse countries will be less likely to provide an adequate level of subsistence (otherwise known as basic human needs) and security rights (also known as integrity of the person rights) to their citizens than regimes in more homogeneous countries. Using a data set of 106 non-OECD countries for the years 1983 and 1993, I employ bivariate, linear multivariate regression, and causal modeling techniques to test whether higher levels of ethnolinguistic and religious diversity are associated with less regime respect for subsistence and security rights. The analysis reveals that higher levels of cultural diversity do appear to lead to lower respect for subsistence rights. However, counter to the hypothesized relationship, high levels of diversity appear to be compatible with high levels of respect for security rights.