Conclusion: Lessons Drawn from Norm Contestation’s Insights (original) (raw)

Contested Meanings of Norms: A Research Framework

Comparative European Politics, 2007

Constitutionalism is 'a legal limitation on government' and 'an antithesis of arbitrary rule.' It is this aspect of constitutionalism which the contributions to this special issue discuss with reference to various forms of governance beyond the state. It focuses on accommodating cultural diversity within the constitutional framework of one State (e.g. Canada) and on addressing recognition in a constitutional framework beyond the State (e.g. the European Union, the United Nations, or, the World Trade Organization). Once constitutional norms are dealt with outside their sociocultural context of origin, a potentially conflictive situation emerges based on de-linking two sets of social practices (i.e. cultural and organizational practices). The article argues that the potential for conflict caused by moving fundamental norms such as human rights, citizenship, sovereignty or the rule of law outside the bounded territory of states a decoupling of the customary from the organizational occurs, which creates a situation of enhanced contestedness. That is, through this transfer between contexts the meaning of norms becomes contested-as differently socialized individuals (politicians, civil servants, NGO activitis, parliamentarians or lawyers trained in different legal traditions) seek to interpret them. That is, while in supranational contexts actors may agree on the validity of a particular norm, say for example human rights, that agreement may not be recognised outside these limited negotiating contexts. Subsequently, associative connotations with normative meaning is likely to differ according to experience with norm-use. It is therefore important to 'recover' the hidden interrelation between cultural and organizational practices. Both contribute to the interpretation of meanings that are entailed in fundamental norms which are, in turn, constitutive for democratic governance beyond the state.

The Intertextuality of Global Norms. Introduction: Contestation, Agency and the Concept of the Norm

The contestation literature has a norm problem. As I argue in this introductory chapter, the ‘gravitational pull’ of norms as the key unit of analysis in constructivist research creates more problems than it solves for the questions at hand. Although the concept of struggle is the theoretical starting point for contestation research, in order to function as a pragmatist point of commonality between constructivist approaches, it tends to revert back to the core concept of the norm, which has often led to a microscopic focus on single norms. This bears the danger of overemphasis in research designs that then fail to account for the larger meaning structures that norms are embedded in. In this introduction, I hence seek to problematize and re-conceptualize the concepts of norms, agency and change in relation to each other. I maintain that a re-centering on the discursive underpinnings of contestation theory can provide a more thorough understanding of normative context. This also means avoiding a fixed definition of norms as a theoretical starting point. This is the challenge this introductory chapter tackles; to develop a theoretical space for discursive agency while at the same time peeling away contestation from its intricate connection to the concept of the norm without abandoning it altogether. This insistence on a better theoretical implementation of discourse does not run counter to contestation’s insistence on individual agency. As I point out, post-structuralist discourse theory leaves leeway for dialectically constituted agency – and connectedly, discursive change. I argue that intertext can serve as an ideal analytical entry point into both actors’ discursive strategies and normative change as incremental transformation. Intertextual chains are the crucial lines where meaning is contested, and accordingly, where both discursive transformation and stabilization occurs. In this lies actors’ agency because meaning is never entirely stable and most of the time, multiple (though not unlimited) meanings and interpretations are available. Actors leverage intertextuality, linguistic ambiguity and overdetermination to re-interpret, re-contextualize and re-connect meaning, to stabilize and to de-stabilize it. The ‘outcomes’ of such processes hence bear the intertextual traces of past contestations and serve as entry points for future ones. Building on this, I conceptualize norms as intertextual amalgams. This reconnects this dissertation’s research questions with the unavoidable concept of the norm, allowing it to engage the mainstream IR debates while being critical of key assumptions.

From Norm Contestation to Norm Implementation: Recursivity and the Responsibility to Protect

Global Governance, 2018

This article contributes to the burgeoning norms literature in international relations that conceptualizes the norm life cycle as a nonlinear dynamic process that is open to contestation and change of “meanings in use.” There are limitations to this second generation of norms theory, however, most crucially in the identification of agency and process through which dialogue occurs and change is enacted. This article claims that to conceptualize the move from norm contestation as dialogic process to norm implementation as a process that weaves norms into the fabric of institutions in their day-to-day politics and routine practices, there is a need to bring IR norms theory into a fruitful engagement with sociological theory on lawmaking. Sociolegal approaches account for institutional processes that move toward the firming up of norms even if hard law status is not the formal objective. This article applies a sociolegal framework of the recursivity of lawmaking to better understand the current diversification of responsibility to protect implementation efforts across the UN and at the national level.

Norms under Challenge: Unpacking the Dynamics of Norm Robustness

Journal of Global Security Studies, 2019

The introduction develops this special issue's main research question: under which conditions are challenges to norms likely to decrease their robustness? The issue presents current research on con-testation and norm robustness and discusses its limitations. We conceptualize a norm's robustness by examining both the practical and discursive dimensions. Robustness is high when norm addressees express widespread discursive acceptance of a norm's claims (validity) that also generally guide ad-dressees' actions (facticity). When normative claims are discursively rejected by most addressees and do not guide their actions, robustness is low. The contributions develop four broad indicators for measuring robustness (concordance, third-party reactions to norm violation, compliance, and implementation). The norms analyzed here were not easily eroded; despite direct challenges, they remained surprisingly robust. This indicates that norm robustness is not determined by the relative power of norm challengers, but rather types of contestation and structural factors. These include being embedded in larger normative structures, institutionalization, and legal character, although effects of these factors are more ambivalent than norm research has usually supposed.

Norms: An Integrated Framework

Annual Review of Sociology, 2020

Norms are a foundational concept in sociology. Following a period of skepticism about norms as overly deterministic and as paying too little attention to social conflict, inequalities, and agency, the past 20 years have seen a proliferation of norms research across the social sciences. Here we focus on the burgeoning research in sociology to answer questions about where norms come from, why people enforce them, and how they are applied. To do so, we rely on three key theoretical approaches in the literature-consequentialist, relational, and agentic. As we apply these approaches, we explore their implications for what are arguably the two most fundamental issues in sociologysocial order and inequality. We conclude by synthesizing and building on existing norms research to produce an integrated theoretical framework that can shed light on aspects of norms that are currently not well understoodin particular, their change and erosion. 4.1 ,. • • �-Review in Advance first posted on February 26, 2020. (Changes may still occur before final publication.

Norms that Make a Difference: Social Practices and Institutions

2019

Institutions are norm-governed social practices, or so I propose. But what does it mean for a norm to govern a social practice? Theories that analyze institutions as equilibria equate norms with sanctions and model them as costs. The idea is that the sanctions change preferences and thereby behavior. This view fails to capture the fact that people are often motivated by social norms as such, when they regard them as legitimate. I argue that, in order for a social norm to be perceived as legitimate, agents have to acknowledge reasons for conforming to it other than the sanctions they might incur for violating it. In light of this, I defend a theory of institutions that does not only invoke equilibria, but also nor-mative rules that are supported by normative expectations and, in some cases, normative beliefs.

Normology: Integrating insights about social norms to understand cultural dynamics

This paper integrates social norm constructs from different disciplines into an integrated model. Norms exist in the objective social environment in the form of behavioral regularities, patterns of sanctioning, and institutionalized practices and rules. They exist subjectively in perceived descriptive norms, perceived injunctive norms, and personal norms. We also distil and delineate three classic theories of why people adhere to norms: internalization, social identity, and rational choice. Additionally, we articulate an emerging theory of how perceived descriptive and injunctive norms function as two distinct navigational devices that guide thoughts and behavior in different ways, which we term “social autopilot” and “social radar.” For each type of norms, we suggest how it may help to understand cultural dynamics at the micro level (the acquisition, variable influence and creative mutation of cultural knowledge) and the macro level (the transmission, diffusion and evolution of cultural practices). Having laid the groundwork for an integrated study of norm—normology, we then introduce the articles of this special issue contributing theoretical refinements and empirical evidence from different methods and levels of analysis. Managerial implications are discussed.

Lost in translation - A methodological critique of constructivist norm research

2012

the headline of "explaining change", scholars in the 1990s rediscovered the importance of "non-material factors" in International Relations. Questions about the creation, the evolution, and the impact of norms obtained a prominent place in constructivist theorizing. Norm research seemed to offer the most promising alternative to the rationalist mainstream. We argue, however, that constructivist norm research entailed major conceptual and methodological problems which have not yet been spelled out comprehensively. Although norms were introduced as the product of social interaction, empirical studies defined them as expressions of a "given identity" with specifiable "regulative effects". The insight that norms are potentially contested and thus constantly renegotiated through creative action has been lost in translation. Most authors adopted a structuralist framework explaining how norms caused a certain "behavior", putting norm resear...