Norm contestation

This doctoral dissertation investigates the development of the norm of sovereignty as responsibility by focusing on its institutionalization in the framework of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Prominent observers have regarded the emergence of a new norm of sovereignty as responsibility as one of the most significant normative shifts in international society since the aftermath of World War II. Against this backdrop, accounts have proliferated situating the ICC at the cutting edge of normative change. The present study critically engages with the whole set of theoretical foundations underlying this view, including the conventional constructivist understanding of norm development upon which the latter is premised. This, on the one hand, emphasizes the importance of norm institutionalization within “tangible” sets of rules or organizations. On the other, it understands institutionalization itself as a moment of clarity and stabilization, thus largely reducing it to an end-point of the norm emergence process. In other words, norm institutionalization is confined to a positivist view in which institutions fall back to the role of neutral fora. The result is a linear, static, and largely depoliticized account of norm content, which, while yielding to the traditional lack of communication between normative and empirical studies, ends up reiterating a dichotomic and simplistic view in which norms are scripts of emancipation, and power a practice of domination. The dissertation aims to unravel this dilemma altogether by offering a step forward in the development of a post-positivist constructivist approach. In other words, it takes a genuinely trans-disciplinary perspective and delves into the configuration of normativity as part of institutional practice, paying special attention to how the relative power of relevant actors reconstitutes norms during norm negotiation and implementation. Hence, the study  unfolds from an unusual location – at the intersection between normative international theory and the politics of international criminal law; and from there, it seeks to revive discussions about the power-laden nature of the normative fabric of international society, its own dis-symmetries, and its outright hierarchies. To this end, the dissertation asks two major sequential questions: how the overarching system negotiated by states at the Rome Conference affects the selection of situations and cases before the ICC and their outcomes; and how the selection of situations and cases and their outcomes, in turn, “feeds back” to the norm of sovereignty institutionalized through the Court’s practice. The resulting analysis shows the following. While the Rome Statute reflects the persistence of the state as the primary site of political authority and coercion, it also cuts against the normative aspirations of sovereignty as responsibility by leaving the Court specifically ill-equipped to break with a notorious pattern of hyper-protected sovereignty. Outstanding issues such as the ICC’s selectivity and African bias, as well as the Court’s future prospects, are then reconsidered under this light. Those findings are then discussed in the final part of the study. Focusing on questions of delegation to international institutions, this ends with a note of caution. It concludes that the prospects of sovereignty as responsibility, as well as the broader discussion about cosmopolitan governance, lie more with the re-politicization of the debate than a straightforward invocation of greater forms of supranationalism.

This paper analyses EU and member-state responses to the Belt and Road Initiative and addresses norm contestation in Sino-European discourse regarding the primary institutions of Sovereignty, International Law, and Market Economy. The paper combines the toolset of the English School with norm contestation theory in its discourse analysis. The findings show evidence for contestation and increasing tension in Sino-European discourse and relations since the beginning of Xi’s presidency. Moreover, that the BRI, while at first a projection screen for substantive disagreements and contestation, eventually became subject to contestation itself. Based on these findings, the paper advances three arguments. First, that the BRI increasingly presented a challenge to EU cohesion and unity, especially in member states’ foreign policy vis-à-vis China. Second, that substantive disagreements between China and the EU, Germany, and Italy were based in a clash of pluralist and liberal-solidarist interpretations of Sovereignty, International Law, and the Market Economy. Third, that in contesting liberal-solidarist interpretations of PIs, China is resisting European solidarisation and arguably proposing a pluralist alternative to a liberal-solidarist order.

This chapter focuses on norm contestation in the emerging stage by exploring the possible prohibition of lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS), which is advocated by the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. At the UN Convention on Conventional Weapons, there is a shared agreement regarding a new organizing principle on human control. But different normative views on how human control should be regulated are leading the debate to a deadlock situation. On the one hand, the group advocating for inaction and on the other hand, the group of countries willing to ban LAWS. To avoid this, Germany and France together with the EU delegation worked on a soft law instrument. At the intra-EU level, an interinstitutional agreement between the European Commission, the European Parliament, and the Council of the EU has agreed to do not fund LAWS within the European Defence Fund. All in all, in both international organizations deliberation as a mode of contestation was dominant and resulted in a soft contestation of the emerging norm. As a result, the EU at the international level-triggered norm followership, where its fundamental norms and values of EU foreign policy proved to be resilient, while at the intra-EU level it enhanced internal cohesiveness.

Reactions to the promotion of human rights norms in post-conflict countries often clash with central assumptions of established theoretical approaches to norm diffusion. Socialization scholars expect either resistance when strong veto players are present and when resonance is missing, or extensive adoption of norms when states are vulnerable to transnational advocacy. Others predict decoupling processes when local capacities for implementation are scarce. Research on norm localization, in contrast, foresees the reinterpretation and modification of norms. The concept of localization, however, is often used as a catch-all category. Based on a new three-step model of translation into discourse, law and implementation, I distinguish different types of translation. This conceptual approach to norm translation gives an interactional account of how certain types of translation emerge and shows the limits of " cures " for missing compliance proposed in existing approaches. The discussion draws on examples of human rights promotion in post-conflict Guatemala.

Paper prepared for the EISA Pan-European Conference 2018, Prague (earlier versions prepared for the ISA Annual Convention 2017, Baltimore, and Fünfte Offene Sektionstagung der DVPW-Sektion “Internationale Beziehungen” 2017, Bremen).
In the paper I ask why the prohibition of unnecessary suffering and superfluous injury has become irrelevant. Aiming to protect combatants from particularly cruel methods and means of warfare, this fundamental principle of international humanitarian law (IHL) served as a basis for several norms regulating the use of certain weapons, which emerged during the evolution of modern IHL in the 19th and early 20th century. Since then, though, the overall focus has shifted from the protection of combatants to the protection of civilians, and thus, from restrictions on weapons causing unnecessary suffering to restrictions on indiscriminate weapons. Moreover, the SIrUS project, launched by the International Committee of the Red Cross to strengthen the principle of unnecessary suffering, was abandoned without results. Taking the decrease in importance of the principle as a starting point, I explore its reasons by recurring on some emerging strands of research on international norms. After conceptualizing the problem as norm erosion, I suggest norm contestation and permissive effects as two possible explanations. I use data from the institutional discourse in the UN Conference on Certain Conventional Weapons to test the theoretical propositions.

http://www.hsfk.de/fileadmin/downloads/prif133.pdf

Ten years after the recognition of the Responsibility to Protect, this PRIF Report examines the controversies around this bundle of norms.

What is more important - protecting people from mass atrocity, such as a genocide and war crimes or protecting state sovereignty against interference by other states? This is one of the core controversial issues concerning the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). Ten years ago, the UN General Assembly recognized the R2P, a bundle of norms for the prevention of and the reaction to atrocious acts against people. Although the acceptance of the norms has increased since then, they remain in the focus of controversial debates concerning their application, especially with regard to humanitarian interventions.

In PRIF Report No. 133 "Ten Years R2P – What Doesn‘t Kill a Norm Only Makes It Stronger? Contestation, Application and Institutionalization of International Atrocity Prevention and Response", Gregor Hofmann analyzes the discourse on the Responsibility to Protect. He differentiates between diverse aspects of approval and the contestation of the bundle of norms. Which aspects of the R2P are debated and which legitimate concerns are linked to them? The author highlights different possible paths for further development and shows how a dialogue with skeptics could  contribute to the improvement and thus the strengthening of the norm.

Antje Wiener has an excellent intuition for the trends in world politics. The concept of contestation, which she first presented in 2004, 2 became formative for international relations discourses on global orders and international norms in the following years, as scholars searched for tools to make sense of global politics that were being increasingly shaped by (fundamental) conflicts.

According to prevailing diffusion approaches, norms and institutional models in the international realm emerge and are diffused through transnational advocacy networks. According to localization research, they are adopted and changed by local actors, who adjust them to fit their interests and normative context. Neither approach takes into account the cyclical element of translation. Rather, they both present unidirectional models of diffusion. Focusing on Guatemala, this article shows how institutional models for international rule-of-law commissions in post-conflict states were translated in a cyclical process between different domestic and international contexts. It outlines two modes of cycles in this process: (1) norm application and (2) international norm change.

Since 2005, international civil society support has faced increasing resistance around the world. Ethiopia is widely recognized as a key example of this so-called Closing Space phenomenon. With the 2009 Charities and Societies Proclamation (CSP) Ethiopia has established strict regulations on civil society organizations that, in particular, restrict the ability of local associations to make use of foreign funding and the range of activities allowed for foreign (funded) organizations. This paper traces the process of international negotiations that has accompanied the drafting of the CSP and identifies the consequences of these negotiations for international civil society support in the country. Focusing on the interaction between foreign "donors" and the Ethiopian government, it analyzes (a) what precisely these negotiations have been about, (b) to what extent these negotiations have actually influenced the content of the CSP, and (c) how the CSP as finally adopted has actually affected international civil society support in Ethiopia.

Il est un phénomène qui est resté inaperçu, alors même qu’il a profondément transformé le paysage urbain du pays : l’explosion de « el ‘achwai », terme qui est utilisé pour nommer tous les types d’informalité (constructions illégales, commerce sauvage, etc.). Cette extension de l’affranchissement par certaines catégories de la population de tout respect des normes étatiques en vigueur a marqué l’année 2012. Cet article va porter sur une forme spécifique de conduite informelle : celle qui s’organise autour de la question de l’habitat.

Grappling specifically with the norm of sovereignty as responsibility, the book seeks to advance a critical constructivist understanding of norm development in international society, as opposed to the conventional – or liberal – constructivist (mis)understanding that still dominates the debate. Against this backdrop, the book delves into the institutionalization of sovereignty as responsibility within the lived practice of the International Criminal Court (ICC). More to the point, the proposed exploration intends to revive questions about the power-laden nature of the normative fabric of international society, its dis-symmetries, and its outright hierarchies, in order to devise an original framework to operationalize research on how – institutional – practice impinges on norm development. To this end, the book resorts to an original creole vocabulary, which combines the contributions of post-positivist constructivist scholars with the legacy of key post-modernist thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, as well as critical approaches to International (Criminal) Law and Post-Colonial Studies. The book will appeal to scholars of international relations and international law, in addition to critical scholars more broadly, as well as to practitioners in the fields of human rights and international justice interested in normative theory and the implementation and contestation of international social norms.

Der immer wieder auf ammende Streit um die Anwendung der Schutzverantwortung in konkreten Kon iktfällen wird zunehmend als Indiz dafür gewertet, dass die R2P gar keine Norm, eine norm-to-be oder eine Norm im Scheitern sei. Der Beitrag argumentiert dagegen, dass Normen nicht automatisch Geltung verlieren, wenn ihre Anwendung umstritten ist. Normen sind auf Anwendungsdiskurse angewiesen, die ihre Angemessenheit für eine Handlungssituation feststellen müssen. Der Streit um ihre Anwendung kann ihre Geltung sogar stärken, indem er Lernprozesse anstößt. Problematisch wird es, wenn Streit sich radikalisiert, d.h. von der Anwendung auf den Normierungskern übergeht. Dies ist für die Schutzverantwortung bislang nicht zu erkennen.

Elephants and whales took center stage in the environmental movements of the 1980s. As flagship species, they were the poster children of global initiatives: international ivory trading and commercial whaling were banned in the 1980s in the context of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) and the International Whaling Commission (IWC), respectively. While the conservation of both species is contested, we observe a change of existing norms in one case but not in the other: A moratorium on commercial whaling remains in place. Meanwhile, a limited shift to sustainable use regarding ivory was passed in 1997/2000. We ask why norm change occurred in one case but not the other, given their similarities. We argue that the difference can be explained by the perceived legitimacy of the claims of norm challengers using arguments of "affectedness" and the breadth of issues covered by CITES. In contrast, other factors commonly discussed in norms research do not explain this puzzle: the relative power and strategies of norm advocates and challengers, and the degree of legalization. This shows the interplay of discursive aspects and concrete institutional opportunities for norm change, even in the face of otherwise inopportune conditions.

One feature that links the contemporary agendas of international state- and peacebuilding with the broader field of development aid is that all these international policies, since 1990, have increasingly aimed at promoting a particular system of rule, namely: liberal/market de-mocracy. In recent years, however, the legitimacy of this overarching neoliberal agenda has increasingly been put into question, with the promotion of liberal democracy criticized as unjust intervention, and scholars and practitioners have observed rising resistance to international democracy promotion in and by “recipient” countries. In this paper, we focus on the supposedly most benign way of promoting democracy, which, nevertheless, has seen a sub-stantial backlash in many countries around the globe: the external support of civil society organizations. Specifically, we ask to what extent the backlash against democracy promotion includes serious challenges to the very normative underpinnings of democracy promotion and thus goes beyond countermeasures directed against specific actors and practices. After briefly introducing the global phenomenon that is discussed as “closing space” for international democracy support and outlining our analytical framework, we will look at two cases of con-testation that concern the foreign funding of civil society organizations: the May 2013 debate in the U.N. Human Rights Council on this topic and the controversy about the prosecution of foreign (funded) NGOs in Egypt between 2011 and 2013.

This paper has been presented at the 9th Pan-European Conference on International Relations, 23-26 September 2015, Giardini Naxos (Sicily). It is co-authored by Annika E. Poppe and Jonas Wolff.

"Zehn Jahre nach Anerkennung der R2P untersucht der neueste HSFK-Report Chancen und Kontroversen in der Entwicklung des Normbündels.
Was wiegt schwerer - der Schutz von Menschen vor Gräueltaten wie Genoziden und Kriegsverbrechen oder der Schutz staatlicher Souveränität vor dem Eingriff anderer Staaten? Das ist einer der Hauptstreitpunkte bei der Anerkennung der kollektiven Schutzverantwortung (R2P). Die R2P, ein Bündel von Normen zur Prävention von und Reaktion auf Gewalttaten wurde vor zehn Jahren von der VN-Generalversammlung anerkannt. Die Bevölkerungen aller Staaten sollen vor Völkermord und anderen schweren Gräueltaten geschützt werden. Doch die R2P steht nach wie vor im Fokus kontroverser Debatten was ihre Anwendung, vor allem im Bezug auf humanitäre Interventionen, betrifft.
In HSFK-Report Nr. 9/2014 "Im Streit gestärkt oder umstrittener als behauptet? Zehn Jahre diplomatische Kontroversen über die Schutzverantwortung" analysiert Gregor Hofmann den Diskurs um die internationale Schutzverantwortung und zeichnet dabei ein differenziertes Bild von Zustimmung zu und Widerspruch gegen das Bündel von Normen. Welche Aspekte der R2P stehen zur Debatte und welche legitimen Bedenken sind damit verknüpft? Der Autor beleuchtet unterschiedliche mögliche Entwicklungspfade und zeigt, wie durch Dialog mit den Skeptikern die Norm weiterhin verbessert und gestärkt werden kann."

Quelle: http://hsfk.de/Newsdetail.25.0.html?&tx_ttnews[tt_news]=1417&tx_ttnews[backPid]=5&cHash=81c09ff55e

Studies of ROs have tended to focus on Western ROs (such as the EU or NATO) or use them as benchmarks in relation to Southern ROs. But several generalizable characteristics of Southern ROs depart from those of the West: (1) more ambiguous goals, which may be due to (2) greater political and cultural diversity of its members, and (3) greater resistance to hegemonies or conceding sovereignty – the post-colonial mindsets of young states. These tendencies have led to decentralized but elite-led decision-making structures in ROs. At the same time, the problems facing them are not different from others, including inter alia, conflict resolution, maintaining legitimacy, and promoting regional integration, and there are some remarkable similarities in their institutional histories.
This paper will thus look at normative dynamics in two Southern ROs – the AU and ASEAN – characterized by these features of diversity and resistance to centralization. Emerging from heterogeneous beginnings, their norms tended to differ from Western ROs because of the diverse norm circles that comprise the decision-making structures, even as they face external problems similar to other ROs. Diversity and resistance to centralization therefore make norm contestation at a fundamental level likely (e.g. whether or not to intervene, rather than how to intervene), while the stakes involved are higher as actions are precedent-setting in low institutional settings with fewer rules.
The paper will thus contribute to understanding how normative orders emerge (and when they did not) in the midst of contested normative positions, a salient question in a transforming global community.

This article explores two specific cases of religio-political actors striving for power through the use of
violent acts which they legitimate on grounds of religious duty. It compares the case of the Maccabean
uprising in the 2nd century B. C. to the case of Jihādist battles in contemporary Iraq. Although one might
find these cases too different in terms of historical framework, hence social environment, and other relevant
conditions are comparable.
In a first step theoretical considerations of strategies used by certain religio-political actors to delineate
themselves from their social environment, consolidate their beliefs and strengthen their own identity,
will be discussed. Being regarded as “nonconformist”, they try to fight against those in power whom they
consider as culturally offensive and politically as well as religiously illegitimate.
In the second part of this article empirical evidence is presented, that focusses not only on the descriptions
of battles against the powerful, but rather on confrontations with the ‘enemy within’, i. e. all the people
that are being regarded by the Maccabees or the Jihādists as undermining the community of “orthodox”
believers and thus compromise their “covenant with God”. Being so strict and even conducting acts of
violence against their coreligionists has to be legitimized through the selective use of traditions (mainly
their “holy scriptures”) as well as through evident changes of traditions if that serves the very purpose. This
transformation of their own tradition can be labelled as a process of cultural dynamics, recognizable in
religious conduct and production of media.

Contestation of international norms has become the new focus of IR norm research. The optimism of the 1990s that fundamental liberal norms would diffuse globally has remained unfulfilled in recent years—even human rights norms have witnessed strong contestation. Time and again, controversy has erupted regarding international norms such as the ban on torture or the Responsibility to Protect. Meanwhile, we know little about how such controversy affects the robustness of norms—whether it contributes to their weakening or to their strengthening. Existing research offers two competing hypotheses: One branch of norm research often conceptualizes contestation as a sign of norm weakening. By contrast, another branch assigns contestation a normative power of its own, which strengthens norms. It does not specify the limits of such normative power, however. In this article, we argue that contestation per se is a poor predictor of norm robustness. The type of contestation a norm faces matters. Contestation can either (1) address the dimension of application of a norm or (2) examine its validity by questioning the righteousness of the claims a norm makes. The article draws on two illustrative case studies of extensively contested norms, the Responsibility to Protect and the ban on commercial whaling. We argue that widespread contestation of the very validity of a norm is likely to lead to a loss of norm robustness. Applicatory contestation, by contrast, can—under specific circumstances—even strengthen it.

External democracy promotion by North-Western countries, while enjoying a honeymoon period in the 1990s, has recently run into trouble. Democracy promotion is faced with a multitude of challenges; resistance is growing along with the rise of non-Western and in part non-democratic powers, and scholars have diagnosed a “democratic recession” and a “backlash” against democracy promotion. This convergence of challenges has brought about a revival of contestation of democracy promotion in both the political and the academic spheres. As the liberal hegemony is increasingly questioned, it has become clear that liberal democracy can no longer be considered an unrivaled template for political development around the world. Contemporary normative contestation of democracy promotion concerns both the general idea that external actors are entitled to meddle in (re-)shaping the political order in sovereign states as well as the specific model that is to be promoted from abroad. This paper focuses on such normative contestation of liberal democracy promotion. It theoretically outlines the normative challenge ground around democracy promotion and delineates a framework for empirically analyzing these challenges. To take a first step into that direction, the paper takes an exemplary look at recent expressions of normative contestation of US democracy promotion in Egypt and Bolivia. In particular, we will focus on the recent controversy around the prosecution of foreign democracy promotion organizations in Egypt and on the conflict leading to the closure of USAID’s democracy program in Bolivia. In analyzing these two cases, the paper will examine two important instances of resistance to, and contestation of, North-Western liberal democracy promotion, including the ways in which North-Western governments have responded to these challenges.

International organisations reflect global power configurations and as such, are deemed to reproduce global inequalities. Nevertheless, they also represent opportunities for the Global South to challenge the global stratification of power, for instance by providing personnel to international agencies and bureaucracies. This article examines the role of leadership personnel from the Global South in implementing robust peacekeeping mandates. Given that states from the Global South have often been hesitant to support the use of force internationally, can leadership positions in peace operations help these states to influence norms at the implementation level? We develop a conceptual understanding of individuals' role in implementing norms and apply the framework to military force commanders from Brazil, India, and Rwanda. The analysis demonstrates that appointments provide an opportunity for norm contestation, but do not necessarily guarantee such influence. Under certain circumstances, we find that military force commanders can actually undermine their governments' preferences. However, the relation between force commanders' practices and their country of origin's policy stance is complex and influenced by a variety of different factors that merit further investigation.

This article sets out to contribute to the debate on how Arab refugee hosting states, generally regarded as norm recipients and recalcitrant implementers of refugee law, have sought to shape, localize, and reconfigure understandings and practices of asylum. More broadly, it also hints at how states draw on the question of asylum to craft “political imaginaries” defined as certain ways of seeing, representing, and enacting the political to entrench power structures and strategies of governance. Drawing on the example of Lebanon, traditionally considered as a peripheral actor in the Euro-Mediterranean migration system, I explore how the small state has recast the understandings of refugee reception and resisted some prescriptions for refugee solutions. In doing so, the Lebanese polity, I argue, has twinned its refugee politics with a broader logic of governmentality vying on sectarian and geopolitical imaginings.

Following this workshop's discussion of Rosenberg's emphasis on societal multiplicity, this contribution discusses how and why this might generate an added value for IR as a discipline. To that end, it explores the promises of the concept of societal multiplicity as a deep ontology. It is argued that a key promise consists in the proposed ontology's qualitative ('more than one kind') and quantitative ('more than one') dimensions as drivers of international relations practice and theory. Both drivers work across societal boundaries and within societies alike, thereby developing interrelated and mutually reinforcing dynamics. Programmatically, the promises of societal multiplicity remain to be explored with reference to Rosenberg's five potential consequences (i.e. coexistence , difference, interaction, combination, and dialectical change. Specifically, a central promise lies in its potential to fill the research gap which consists of the absence of social contract theory (i.e. as offering the conceptual angle on the 'unbound' quality of fundamental norms, based on the 'politics of recognition') for legitimate global governance. Here, societal multiplicity sheds light on societal negotiations of values, thereby adding to extant practice and agency-based theories of international ordering. This article illustrates the point with reference to the subfield of norms research. It shows how extant concepts of political practices vis-à-vis norms stand to benefit from applying societal multiplicity insofar as it targets the contingency of international ordering through societal interaction. This matters because societal and political ordering in a globalised space does not begin from a given 'liberal community' (top-down) but from a socially constructed emerging set of orders (bottom-up). The argument is presented in four sections. Section 1 presents the turn towards societal multiplicity as a deep ontology in order to address the absence of social contract theory in IR. It identifies a gap between the 'use' of fundamental norms for global governance purposes, on the one hand, and the 'contestations' of their implementation by affected stakeholders, on the other. Section 2 addresses the point of re-establishing IR as a lone standing discipline in the social sciences. Against the current state of a fragmented discipline, it asks how a shift towards societal multiplicity might work towards countering that fragmentation. Section 3 turns to the norms research literature. To illustrate the argument it explores potential pathways towards filling the gap between state-mediated and locally contested norms of global governance. Section 4 concludes with an outlook towards framing the crisis of international law as a value based.

In current norm research in International Relations (IR), the contestation and the dynamics around norms have become the new focus of analysis. Contestation of norms and their application can either lead to a strengthening or weakening of norms as scholars argue. But under which conditions does contestation lead to either one? We argue that the type of contestation matters to explain if contestation has norm strengthening or norm weakening effects. While contestation around the application of norms usually results in a specification in which situation a norm applies and how it needs to be applied, contestation of the validity of a norm questions the norm as such and – over time – often leads to a weakening of the norm. The paper will, in a first step, discuss the different approaches to norm contestation that can be found in IR research. In a second step, it will present the argument and a typology of norm contestation that is based on a discourse theory of law and normativity. The argument will, in a third step, be empirically illustrated by analyzing the contestatory discourses around the responsibility to protect and the whaling ban.

Current contestations of the liberal international order stand in notable contrast with the earlier rise of international law during the post-cold war period. As Krieger and Liese argue, this situation calls for assessment of the type of change that is currently observed, i.e. norm change (Wandel) or a more fundamental transformation of international law – a metamorphosis (Verwandlung)? To address this question, this paper details the bi-focal approach to norms in order to reflect and take account of the complex interrelation between fact-based and value-based conceptions of norms. The paper is organised in three sections. The first section presents three axioms underlying the conceptual framework to study norm(ative) change which are visualised by a triangular operation to analyse this change in relation with practices and norms. The second section recalls three key interests that have guided IR norms research after the return to norms in the late 1980s. They include, first, alloca...

By focusing on the Western Balkans, this paper asks two questions:
first, how small states that are both EU members and candidates for membership understand their role within this normatively powered order and, second, what their roles and agency mean for the order they are socialised into via democratic norms. The notions of hierarchies and orders are conceptualised in this paper as processes of norm diffusion and understood within the socialisation of democratic norms, which, according to the literature, can be institutionalised, rejected, or modified locally. First, I argue that such measurements can help us understand how the EU’s practices shape the broader understanding of its actorness in normative and strategic terms toward the Western Balkans. Second, I scrutinise national strategies related to the processes of state-building, security, economy, and society to demonstrate how Serbia and Croatia present their agency as supporting and affirming of the prevalent conception of order in norm localisation, or being more critical of
it in the process of localised norm contestation. Third, the effects of EU approaches that provide more tactical and technical views of Europeanisation, rather than (a strategic) full thrust on enlargement, are discussed in the conclusion by bringing the comparative insights together and parsing them by means of the shelter theory for small states.

The contributions to this volume add to the existing scholarship in confirming that natural resource extraction on a massive scale is not only a constitutive feature of the national political economies of a number of countries, in particular in the global South, which justifies the talk of extractivism as a development model. This development model and the extractive activities that are associated with it are also very much contested. The contestation over extractivism is, therefore and without a doubt, a politically important topic. But studying the interactive practices through which extractivism is contested across different world regions is also academically challenging. In this concluding chapter, I want to reflect on three overarching questions that are crucial in this regard.
First, I take the notion of contested extractivism seriously, briefly discuss the types of contestation over extractivism that are highlighted in the literature and suggest a specific way of conceptualising this object of research. Second, addressing this volume’s focus on state-society relations, I consider the complex relationship between contestation over extractivism and democracy. While much research has addressed the problems that extractivism as a development model might pose for democracy, I argue that contestation over extractivism also raises complicated questions for which democratic theory and democratic procedures offer no clear-cut solutions. Third and finally, I reflect on a normative tension that is associated with an academic approach that combines a critical perspective on extractivism with the empirical study of its contestation by those affected.

Following this workshop’s discussion of Rosenberg’s emphasis on societal multiplicity, this contribution discusses how and why this might generate an added value for IR as a discipline. To that end, it explores the promises of the concept of societal multiplicity as a deep ontology. It is argued that a key promise consists in the proposed ontology’s qualitative (‘more than one kind’) and quantitative (‘more than one’) dimensions as drivers of international relations practice and theory. Both drivers work across societal boundaries and within societies alike, thereby developing interrelated and mutually reinforcing dynamics. Programmatically, the promises of societal multiplicity remain to be explored with reference to Rosenberg’s five potential consequences (i.e. co-existence, difference, interaction, combination, and dialectical change. Specifically, a central promise lies in its potential to fill the research gap which consists of the absence of social contract theory (i.e. as offering the conceptual angle on the ‘unbound’ quality of fundamental norms, based on the ‘politics of recognition’) for legitimate global governance. Here, societal multiplicity sheds light on societal negotiations of values, thereby adding to extant practice and agency-based theories of international ordering. This article illustrates the point with reference to the subfield of norms research. It shows how extant concepts of political practices vis-a-vis norms stand to benefit from applying societal multiplicity insofar as it targets the contingency of international ordering through societal interaction. This matters because societal and political ordering in a globalised space does not begin from a given ‘liberal community’ (top-down) but from a socially constructed emerging set of orders (bottom-up). The argument is presented in four sections. Section 1 presents the turn towards societal multiplicity as a deep ontology in order to address the absence of social contract theory in IR. It identifies a gap between the ‘use’ of fundamental norms for global governance purposes, on the one hand, and the ‘contestations’ of their implementation by affected stakeholders, on the other. Section 2 addresses the point of re-establishing IR as a lone standing discipline in the social sciences. Against the current state of a fragmented discipline, it asks how a shift towards societal multiplicity might work towards countering that fragmentation. Section 3 turns to the norms research literature. To illustrate the argument it explores potential pathways towards filling the gap between state-mediated and locally contested norms of global governance. Section 4 concludes with an outlook towards framing the crisis of international law as a value based.

This article sets out to contribute to the debate on how Arab refugee hosting states, generally regarded as norm recipients and recalcitrant implementers of refugee law, have sought to shape, localize, and reconfigure understandings and practices of asylum. More broadly, it also hints at how states draw on the question of asylum to craft “political imaginaries” defined as certain ways of seeing, representing, and enacting the political to entrench power structures and strategies of governance. Drawing on the example of Lebanon, traditionally considered as a peripheral actor in the Euro-Mediterranean migration system, I explore how the small state has recast the understandings of refugee reception and resisted some prescriptions for refugee solutions. In doing so, the Lebanese polity, I argue, has twinned its refugee politics with a broader logic of governmentality vying on sectarian and geopolitical imaginings.

Current contestations of the liberal international order stand in notable contrast with the earlier rise of international law during the post-cold war period. As Krieger and Liese argue, this situation calls for assessment of the type of change that is currently observed, i.e. norm change (Wandel) or a more fundamental transformation of international law – a metamorphosis (Verwandlung)? To address this question, this paper details the bi-focal approach to norms in order to reflect and take account of the complex interrelation between fact-based and value-based conceptions of norms. The paper is organised in three sections. The first section presents three axioms underlying the conceptual framework to study norm(ative) change which are visualised by a triangular operation to analyse this change in relation with practices and norms. The second section recalls three key interests that have guided IR norms research after the return to norms in the late 1980s. They include, first, allocating change in and through practice, second, identifying behavioural change with reference to norm- following, and third, identifying norm(ative) change with reference to discursive practice. The third section presents the two analytical tools of the conceptual frame, namely, the norm-typology and the cycle-grid model. It also indicates how to apply these tools with reference to illustrative case scenarios. The conclusion recalls the key elements of the conceptual framework for research on norm(ative) change in international relations in light of the challenge of establishing sustainable normativity in the global order.

This article analyzes the contested relationship between two practices of intervention on behalf of human rights victims, "humanitarian" military interventions and judicial interventions through international criminal tribunals. While both practices have come to be viewed as complementary instruments in the liberal interventionist "toolbox," their historical evolution was marked by tensions and controversies. To understand both the source of these frictions and how they could be (partly) overcome, the article draws attention to historical and contemporary processes of norm hybridization, that is, to discursive and institutional shifts that have merged different, pre-existing normative ideas into new, complex normative arrangements. Open access at https://www.ssoar.info/ssoar/bitstream/handle/document/65758/ssoar-humrightsq-2019-4-fehl-Bombs_trials_and_rights_norm.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y&lnkname=ssoar-humrightsq-2019-4-fehl-Bombs_trials_and_rights_norm.pdf

Los autores constructivistas que desarrollaron el modelo de ciclo vital de las normas no exploran en profundidad el fenómeno de la disputa normativa o norm contestation. Por otra parte, los estudios constructivistas más recientes, si bien hacen hincapié en el fenómeno, focalizan el desarrollo normativo en torno a él, en desmedro del modelo de ciclo vital. El presente trabajo pretende insertar la problemática de la disputa normativa dentro de dicho modelo, a partir del reconocimiento de la figura del objetor normativo como un actor relevante en el surgimiento y desarrollo de normas, a través del estudio del caso de la Responsabilidad de Proteger.

Gregor Peter Hofmann untersucht, wie Gerechtigkeitskonflikte zwischen Staaten die Entwicklung internationaler Normen beeinflussen. Er analysiert hierfür die Debatte über humanitäre Interventionen und das umstrittene Normbündel der internationalen Schutzverantwortung (Responsibility to Protect, R2P). Die R2P hält Staaten dazu an, Völkermord, Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit, Kriegsverbrechen und ethnische Säuberungen zu verhindern. Anknüpfend an die konstruktivistische Normenforschung in den Internationalen Beziehungen, zeichnet der Autor detailliert empirisch nach, wie konträre Vorstellungen über eine gerechte Weltordnung im Spannungsfeld zwischen individuellen Menschenrechten, staatlichen Souveränitätsansprüchen und Forderungen nach prozeduraler Gerechtigkeit das Normbündel der R2P prägen.