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The amount of attention devoted to women and women's issues has increased dramatically in the last five decades throughout the world. In this article we examine the cultural construction of women that guided such action by analyzing texts that were produced and activities that were undertaken in relation to women by international organizations from 1945 through 1995. We show that the modernist principles of universalism, liberal individualism, and rationality provided the culturalframework for this global project. We compare the ways in which two issues important to women, education and genital mutilation, were constructed by global actors and the implications of this meaning making for action over time. Our analysis reveals an important link between the extent to which an issue is constructed to be consistent with the modernist principles and the extent to which it receives global attention.

Building on the literature that analyzes the impact of norms and ideas on international and domestic politics, it is our assumption that the widespread introduction and dissemination of a human rights discourse enables oppressed groups to translate events into rights language and to appeal to courts, politicians and media in order to seek remedies for their grievances. In so far as human rights discourse actually helps introduce more ethical policies and legislation, it is crucial to understand how this discourse, which in the past 55 years evolved and proliferated on the global level, emerges and develops in domestic settings. Using Israel as a case study, and more specifically analyzing the Israeli press, we further develop some of the existing theoretical claims about how the global and local interact. We argue that in order to understand how the rights discourse is imported into the domestic arena and how it expands once it enters the local scene, it is crucial to employ a broader conception of the global and a more differentiated view of the local. We emphasize the significance of local events and practices in determining the impact of the global on national settings, suggesting that one cannot understand transnational flows without unveiling the black box of the domestic arena.

Focusing on the flow of funding to human rights non-governmental organizations (NGOs), we begin in this article to broach one of the least studied issues pertaining to transnational regimes-namely, their material underpinnings. Through an analysis of the patterns of donor funding to human rights NGOs, we underscore the triangulation between states, donors, and rights NGOs, whereby states have an impact on donor preferences, which, in turn, influences the agenda of human rights NGOs and their modes of operation, and these, in their turn, help shape the kind of NGO criticism voiced against the state. By emphasizing the important and frequently missing link of donors, we thus complicate the discussion concerning the impact human rights networks have on state policies and practices, showing how rights NGOs simultaneously weaken and strengthen the state. Accordingly, our examination of the political economy of human rights adds a new dimension to the literature analyzing how the state both reconfigures and is reconfigured by transnational regimes.While most scholars acknowledge the existence of a robust human rights regime within the international arena, there is an ongoing debate about whether this regime has had a significant impact on state policies and practices. In this article, we claim that one of the issues missing from the debate is the political economy of human rights non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which are the major actors within the rights regime. We argue that in order to understand the potential rights NGOs have to alter state policies and to bring about social change, as well as some of the reasons why this potential is often foiled, it is crucial to consider the economic field within which the NGOs operate. By taking into account the impact of the economic field, we hope not only to broaden the discussion concerning the ability of the human rights regime to influence state policies and practices, but also to lay bare some of the more intricate ways through which the global and the state interact.The research examining the impact of human rights norms on state policies and practices (Brysk

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