ABSTRACT
Human rights abuses committed by state authorities continue to be widespread throughout the world.1 Today, state violence has become more than a mere theoretical curiosity, and much more than a simple moral offense. Violations of human rights, once thought to be purely domestic matters, are now subject to international condemnation and monitoring. Human rights have become a focus for international institution building, the foundation of new legal and normative frameworks, and a central advocacy concern for social movements all across the world. As a consequence, human rights issues present themselves as fertile ground for social scientific inquiry and stand to benefit from sociological insight. This dissertation hopes to contribute to the study of human rights by broadening the theoretical lens through which state violence has been viewed within the social sciences, and hopes also to make meaningful connections between social scientific research and human rights advocacy. Placing human rights concerns at the center of inquiry is at once theoretically engaging, socially relevant, and empirically challenging. Human rights questions have tremendous relevance within the world, and it is this relevance which, first and foremost, motivates this research.
