This chapter explores the three sets of issues. First, relationships among different types of rights, and the sequential expansion of these rights in Latin America. Second, questions of economic rights, equity, and marginalization in the context of market-oriented economic restructuring. Third, implications for human rights of the tension between universalis! and pluralist norms and institutions in an era characterized both by increasing globalization and by the accentuation of local specificities. The tension between recognition of universal rights and respect for diversity and plurality is another reminder of the links between the local and the global and of their consequences for sovereignty. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, provides the basic framework for a universalist perspective. The ideology of universal human rights would thus serve to protect potential or actual victims. The Universal Declaration was widely criticized for adopting an underlying notion of human rights that was individualistic and Western.

As many of you are aware, the American Political Science Association has recently experienced an extraordinary outpouring of frustration with the current state of the American Political Science Review, the APSA, and the profession generally. An anonymous scholar writing as "Mr. Perestroika" circulated to an extensive roster of political scientists a passionate memo asking many provocative, indeed painful, questions. Why do so many leaders of our profession not even read, much less submit, to the APSR7 Why is purchase of the APSR made mandatory for membership, thus subsidizing a journal many find unsatisfactory, instead of permitting membership without the journal or with other journals? Why do the APSA Council and APSR Editorial Board seem to be chosen essentially by their predecessors? Why does the APSR and why do other prominent professional fora seem so intensively focused on technical methods, at the expense of the great, substantive political questions that actually intrigue many APSA members, as well as broader intellectual audiences? Though some recipients may have felt uncomfortable with the anonymous authorship and the highly polemical tone of this post, nonetheless an astonishing number of scholars, from all ranks of the profession, felt impelled to announce that they, too, shared these profound dissatisfactions with the status quo. Many noted that in 1998 an APSA membership survey reportedly found that, in fact, a very large proportion of APSA members, to say nothing of scholars who have given up on APSA, were critical of the current condition of the APSR. A lively discussion ensued, in which scholars discussed whether the problems arose from the biases of APSR editors and APSA leaders, from more structural problems in the reviewing processes, or from problems in AmeriEditor's Note