Human Rights and Social Movements: From the Boomerang Pattern to a Sandwich Effect

Human rights and social movements have long had mutually constitutive relationships with each other, but scholarship that examines this link had been relatively slow to develop. Since the late 1990s, however, social scientists in the United States have produced a growing body of literature on how social movements engage with international human rights institutions to advance their cause and form transnational alliances. We examine this literature and offer future directions for this line of research that 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 be called 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 in concert to promote human rights in the world