1. Home
  2. Centers & Institutes
  3. Center on Globalization, Law, and Society
  4. Activities
  5. [[transnational-ordering-criminal-justice]]
  6. Overview

Performance, Power, and Transnational Legal Ordering: Addressing Sexual Violence as a Human Rights Concern

Ron Levi and Ioana Sendroiu


Abstract

This paper connects analyses of transnational legal orders with research in cultural sociology on performance and power (Alexander 2011; Halliday and Shaffer 2015). By focusing on legal norms or institutions that cross borders – whether or not they are “international” – work on transnational legal orders opens up the opportunity to study processes of legal change that focus on status enhancement, networks, and peer review, rather than more formal processes of legal regulation, enforcement, and compliance (see Shaffer 2013). We here focus on rape and sexual violence, which over the past few years has emerged as one of the central issues of rights reform. We do so through an analysis of the UN’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR), which relies on a format of peer review and on the logic of recommendations rather than on an adjudicative approach to human rights compliance. The UPR process uniquely suited to studying norms across multiple scales, since the materials reviewed include a “state report,” a “civil society report,” and a compiled “UN report,” from which each state record is then reviewed by a panel of three reviewing states. In response to human rights recommendations, states then respond by either accepting or “noting” recommendations – thereby indicating that they either intend to act on the recommendation, or that they are likely to ignore it. The UPR thus provides a forum for studying the relations between states that propose and receive recommendations, as well as the relationship between national and transnational legal concerns. Through multiple correspondence analysis, we geometrically map out the emergence of recommendations, their emphasis on reforming law or building state capacity, and their reception by states under review; and we select two case studies to draw out how different levels of domestic and international actors interact in this process. In so doing, we suggest that the study of transnational legal orders benefits from a cultural sociology that turns our attention to performance, power, and audiences, and with it an analysis of how transnational legal concerns are also concerns over domestic state legitimacy.