Human Rights in Contemporary Political Sociology: The Primacy of Social Subjects

A temporal overlap involving the constructivist turn in sociology and national and transnational human rights struggles has transformed human rights into an important research topic within political sociology. This article establishes the principal sociopolitical research questions in the field of human rights and conducts a review of academic literature on the subject, establishing three main fields of human rights research within the sub-discipline: human rights as the articulating axis for collective action; subject participation in the construction of discourse and the effects of domination and emancipation on this construction; and transformations to the category of citizenship resulting from the challenges posed by global migration.