This review examines recent scholarship on the rise of international human rights law and proposes that social movements have played critical roles both in elevating the standards of human rights in international law and in leveraging these standards into better local practices. Institutionalization of universal human rights principles began in the immediate post–World War II period, in which civil society actors worked with powerful states to establish human rights as a key guiding principle of the international community and to ensure the actors' continuing participation in international human rights institutions. The subsequent decades saw various hurdles arise in international politics, but civil society actors skillfully used the small openings that they had gained to continue to advance the cause of human rights. They held powerful governments accountable to their lofty promises about human rights and worked with sympathetic governments in the UN system to continuously upgrade the standards of international human rights. They also leveraged human rights laws toward better local practices, taking advantage of new political opportunities created by human rights laws, using expanding international channels to increase flows of human and material resources, embracing globally legitimated vocabularies of human rights to frame their movements, and integrating the broad cultural effects of human rights laws to construct new social movement identity and actorhood. The review then points out some potential pitfalls of international human rights laws: professionalization of movement actors, which can undermine the impact of social movements and lead to less ambitious and transformative goals; privileging of some causes over others, which can lead to demobilization around certain issues; and overextending movement goals, which can give rise to strong backlash against human rights principles.

Sociologists have long been interested in collective representations of the past, as well as the processes through which individuals, groups, or events have been excluded from those representations. Despite this rich body of literature, few studies have examined the processes through which long‐silenced countermemory becomes integrated within “official” public memory. This study examines two instances of silence breaking in Philadelphia, Mississippi—the town notorious for the silence, denial, and collective obstruction of justice surrounding the 1964 “Mississippi Burning” murders. By reconstructing and comparing the event structure of the twenty‐fifth and fortieth anniversary commemorations—both interracial community‐wide events unique for having punctuated Philadelphia's prevailing silence on the murders—this article finds that commemorability and mnemonic capacity are necessary but insufficient factors for “silence breaking” commemorations to emerge. This study identifies two additional criteria necessary for commemorations that publicly acknowledged long‐silenced pasts: pressure from external forces, and the convergence of interests between those previously opposed to and those in favor of acknowledgment.

Much attention has centered on the causes and composition of commemorations, yet research on commemorations' causal consequences remains relatively unexplored. This study examines the relationship between commemorative events and subsequent mnemonic activism through a comparative historical study of two seemingly similar mnemonic projects with divergent outcomes: the twenty-fifth and fortieth anniversary commemorations in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the city notorious as the site of the 1964 “Mississippi Burning” murders. Drawing insights from the social psychological literature on intergroup contact clarifies how members of the 2004 commemoration task force developed a distinct collective identity across significant social divides through personal storytelling, a development that encouraged local mnemonic activism beyond the commemoration itself. More generally, this research suggests that commemorations both emerge out of and catalyze associated memory movements, and that a commemoration's transformative potential lies in its planning process.

ABSTRACT∞ Just months after the Mississippi Truth Commission’s public launch in 2009, organizers abandoned the Commission despite sufficient funding and growing public support, deciding instead to pursue a statewide oral history project. This study explores why, offering insight into an understudied phenomenon: incomplete truth commissions. Drawing on ethnographic observations, archival documents and interviews with local practitioners, this study highlights several reasons that local organizers changed course. In addition to a shifting cultural context, the Mississippi Truth Commission faced several cognitive challenges. First, local audiences struggled to comprehend the structure and scope of the truth commission model, leading to ‘Transitional Justice 101,’ a perpetual, and ultimately unsuccessful, public education program. Second, local organizers’ visit to South Africa in 2009 cast doubt on the efficacy of truth commissions and caused them to question the metaphoric logic that had constructed Mississippi’s history of racial violence as analogous to South Africa’s, providing implicit justification for the Commission until that point. Thus, alongside economic and political resources, this research suggests that cognitive resources are a critical, and often overlooked, component of truth commissions’ infrastructure. Findings also indicate that incomplete truth commissions can be leveraged to support alternative truth-seeking processes that may be more advantageous in stable democracies.