Papers by Shira Zilberstein
American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, 2020
A new frontier in the sociology of globalization, law and markets is the study of global scripts,... more A new frontier in the sociology of globalization, law and markets is the study of global scripts, the articulation of global norms in formal written documents. This focus has been directed primarily to single sets of scripts authorized by single international organizations that seek to solve a problem or set standards predominantly for a well-defined single issue-area within states. This paper seeks to expand this frontier by the study of global scripts in cases where there are multiple scripts issued by diverse international organizations (IOs) that apply norms to messy issue-areas within states. Our empirical site for exploratory research is the effort by diverse IOs to appeal to varieties of global scripts on physical, legal, social and political harms that result from a lack of basic legal freedoms in both liberal and illiberal polities. We undertook a content analysis of 1310 documents, released by eight IOs between the years 2015-2018, that invoke 152 global scripts to monitor and critique harms in six countries (China, Egypt, Sudan, US, France, India). The paper reports initial findings that: (1) transnational and global monitoring by IOs reaches to heterogenous bundles of physical, legal, social and political harms in all six countries, with special reference to China and Egypt; (2) To hold states accountable, IOs appeal to a dense collection of global and regional scripts, numbering more than 150, that appear to cover the spectrum of harms; (3) The global scripts vary by institutional authority and legitimacy claims and by scope of geographical reach and universality; (4) The global scripts are expressed through a repertoire of formal properties; (5) There is both convergence on a small number of master global scripts and differentiation by IO missions.
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Papers by Shira Zilberstein