Norm contestation

Nearly two decades after its formal endorsement by the international community, the Responsibility to Protect is stuck in a quagmire reminiscent of the contentious politics that both preceded and precipitated it. A once ambitious effort to transform notions of responsibility and practices of accountability regarding civilian protection and atrocity prevention, R2P has stagnated to such a degree that some have dismissed it as a dead letter. This research diagnoses the primary cause of that stagnation while also proposing a way forward for resuscitating R2P's normative aims, via a return to R2P's origins as an accountability mechanism for the provision of human rights and security.

Emerged in the mid-1990s, constructivism has rapidly established itself as a privileged vantage point from which to theorise the development of social norms. Challenging the dominant realist and liberal theoretical paradigms, constructivism stresses the socially constructed nature of the world, as well as the individual-level mechanisms that drive change. Whilst the classical constructivist understanding of norm development is still dominant nowadays, the paper shows that this overdoes the critique of neorealism and neoliberalism's determinism on matters of agency. In fact, it ends up theorising a linear trajectory, which overstates the role of norm entrepreneurs and international institutions by falling short of contextualizing them within the environment in which they operate. Furthermore, moving beyond the mere critical appraisal, the paper proposes a reconfiguration that expressly reconciles agent-based and structure-based explanations. This draws on structuration theory and the latest contribution of the English School of IR about the relationship between 'primary' and 'secondary' institutions; and it maps how environmental conditions and operational realities impinge on the choices of agents and their outcomes, thereby enabling-or limiting-normative change.

This chapter analyzes the use of R2P in Turkish foreign policy (TFP) towards the Syrian civil war from its beginning to early 2017. Turkey has appeared as one of the key actors in the Syrian conflict. Moreover, Turkey’s approach to R2P is closely intertwined with its ambitious policy agenda in the civil war. Therefore, this chapter examines the question as to how the use of R2P has changed as TFP transformed over the course of the Syrian civil war. It also discusses the ways in which R2P has been challenged and/or confirmed by the discourse and practice of TFP towards Syria. In this context, this chapter argues that the use of R2P in TFP during the Syrian civil war is a telling example of the misconduct of R2P by states to legitimize their interventionist policies across their borders.

As outlined in the previous chapter, "rogue states" are seen in large parts of the political and academic discourse as transgressors of universally accepted standards of behavior. They are perceived as norm breakers who display their opposing attitude vis-á-vis the current normative order by disregarding and transgressing basic rules and duties. Consequently, empirical studies usually focus on tracing their alleged non-compliance with norms. This perspective is also shared by (liberal-constructivist) norms research, which at the best considers the countries concerned as objects of normative education, the norm-violating behavior of which must be prevented and which-if possibleshould be reintegrated into the overarching normative order. Scholars focusing on the diffusion and enforcement of norms tend to conceptualize norm-violating states as antagonists to liberal-democratic states (e.g. Risse and Sikkink 1999: 9), usually focusing on authoritarian states found guilty of human rights violations. Along these lines, Trine Flockhart considers "rogue states" to be actors that completely reject the social norms of a socializing agent, who know that they have very little to gain from compliance with those norms, and who know they have no chance of gaining group membership anyway, [and thus] have no incentive to follow an agreed code of conduct.

is an international law, justice, rule of law, governance and security expert. He has worked extensively in and on Africa for nearly 15 years as a legal academic, trainer, consultant and advisor to governments, intergovernmental bodies, and non-profits.

The article examines the impact of emerging international norms on the behavior of states, thus endeavoring to fill a gap within the constructivist IR scholarship which has mostly focused on the relationship between fully-fledged, inter-subjective and internalized norms and the behavior these norms encourage. The main argument it advances is that emerging norms should not be considered as legitimate. Instead, they should be understood in terms of the (morally charged) legitimacy claims that sustain them and have the ability to prompt states to consider compliance due to a fear of international shaming, exclusion or some other losses. Empirically, the article makes an inquiry into China's approach to the "responsibility to protect" (R2P) principle by examining its recent voting strategies in the UN Security Council, namely its abstention on the Resolution tackling Libyan crisis and three subsequent vetoes in relation to Syrian uprising.

The concept of 'responsibility to protect' (R2P) as a response to situations of violent conflict and insecurity, was first formally articulated by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) in 2001, and subsequently endorsed by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly through the Summit Outcome Document (SOD) in 2005. Since then, various UN agencies appear to have accepted R2P by incorporating aspects of the concept into their institutional and operational mandates. Literature on the subject places R2P in the security realm where it is either heralded as a 'paradigm shift' towards progressive humanitarianism or denounced as a mask for imperial militarism. My research expands this conversation by locating R2P in the historical context of the liberal/neoliberal 'security/development dispositif' which has informed the UN system's policies and programs since its inception. Using Foucauldian genealogy, I analyze how/where R2P 'fits' within the UN's historically evolving security/development discourses and practices with two related objectives. First, 'map' empirically R2P's institutional and operational manifestations in the UN to gauge the degrees/forms of its incorporation. Second, assess critically whether R2P's institutional manifestations represent a significant change in the way the UN has approached the relationship between security and development since 1945. To achieve this second objective, I use Foucauldian concepts of 'dispositif', 'governmentality' and 'biopolitics' to 'make sense' of the map by unpacking the meanings (ideational and normative) of R2P. A genealogical analysis of the evidence supplemented by interviews, supports my hypotheses to reveal not only R2P's uneven and contested incorporation across UN agencies, but also how the liberal/neoliberal security/development dispositif as a discursive structure of knowledge and power privileges particular interpretations and applications of R2P's 'three pillars' (responsibility to react, prevent and rebuild). R2P, then, is a discursive rearticulation; a more limited kind of change than a discursive shift, with the emphasis on 'protection' and 'responsibility' signifying both continuity and change in the evolving liberal/neoliberal security/development dispositif.

How do we account for norm (non-)compliance in complex situations of global governance? Instead of emphasising power and diverging interests, this research note develops an innovative framework by arguing for a need to account for the social foundation of norms and the processes of norm contestation amongst relevant stakeholders. It comprises three crucial elements: first, the relevant stakeholders that form around specific policies; second, the types of knowledge about the policy object at stake; and finally, the knowledge gaps across stakeholders and their strategies to overcome them. Based on these considerations we advance a framework of three pillars of 'vested interests', 'vice' and 'virtue': given, first, the diversity of stakeholders in policy-making and their vested interests, we assume, secondly, an increased likelihood for norm contestation. For some this constitutes a vice. However, we argue, thirdly, that open deliberation has the potential to lead to positive implications for governance arrangements and is therefore a virtue for norm compliance. Applying this framework to the example of the use of outer space, we show how our approach can address what we call the 'lasting reality' of global governance, namely the regular confrontation of culturally embedded normativity that stems from the increased diversity of actors in the global realm.

The academic essay discusses the relationship between human rights and peace in the context of the controversy over the phenomenon of shrinking civic spaces, that is, the global trend of increasing restrictions on the capacity, autonomy and collective action of civil society actors. Analyzing the recent wave of civic space restrictions from a political science perspective on both human rights and peace, the contribution particularly points to the complex, and at times counterintuitive, relationship between civic space restrictions, human rights, and peace.

One of the biggest challenges to nationalism stems from the conceptualization of sovereignty as responsibility since the rise of R2P, consecrated by the 2005 UN World Summit. Sixteen years later, however, we live at a time when cosmopolitanism and consequently, multilateralism is increasingly considered outdated by the nationalist upsurge parallel to the rise of sharp powers across the international community, with a direct impact on the demise of the Responsibility to Protect as demonstrated by the tragedies in Syria, Yemen, and Myanmar, where securitization prevails over the humanitarian. Nevertheless, the path leading from R2P to the RN2V (responsibility not to veto) movement indicates that this might be just an episode in the dialectical pattern linking the ups and downs of humanitarian intervention within the R2P context.

This article offers a new conceptualisation of the meaning of norms in world politics. It starts from the observation that existing norm scholarship in International Relations has underestimated the role of ambiguity in the constitution of norm meaning. To address this shortcoming, we advance a conceptualisation that sees norm polysemy – the empirically observable plurality of norm meanings-in-use – as resulting from the enactment of inherently ambiguous norms in different contexts. By foregrounding norm ambiguity, this view offers a radically non-essentialist understanding of norm meaning, one that eschews any attempt to salvage final or ‘true’ meanings behind the polysemy of norms. Using empirical illustrations from different fields of contemporary global governance, we identify four mechanisms through which actors practically cope with the multiplicity of norm meanings that arises from norm ambiguity (deliberation, adjudication, uni- or multilateral fixation attempts, and ad hoc ...

Forthcoming on the Journal of Global Security Studies Are rising authoritarian powers such as China and Russia converging towards or challenging the normative structures of the liberal international order? This article argues that scholarship on norm contestation provides a fruitful theoretical avenue for addressing this question. It finds, however, that this literature has problematically tended to either overlook or externalize power dynamics from norm contestation. The article therefore proposes and develops a power political approach to norm contestation that, informed by a realpolitik sensibility, more explicitly and consistently makes power central to the analysis. A power political perspective conceptualizes norm contestation as the expression of battles for influence in world politics that take place at the ideational level and through symbolic instruments. It understands these struggles as occurring in the context of an international system profoundly marked by conflicting interests, cultural pluralism, hierarchical structures, and power asymmetries. This power political lens is then used to identify four modes of contestation Russian and Chinese actors are engaged in: liberal performance, liberal mimicry, civilizational essentialization, and counter-norm entrepreneurship. It empirically explores how these contestatory practices express themselves at different intensity levelsapplicatory, meaning, and validityand display specific power political logicsfragmenting and integrativewith the goal of undermining the ideational hegemony of liberal Western-based actors and structures in world politics, and advancing alternative non-liberal visions of domestic and international order. Along with contributing to the literature on norms, this paper also makes a broader intervention in current debates about rising powers and the future of the liberal international order

The emergence of Non Government Organizations (NGOs) in various fields of life is proof that civil society is essential in building a democratic society. NGOs can educate citizens and communities on their fundamental rights to create a democratic state and world order life. NGOs in Indonesia and Egypt have played a significant role in strengthening democratic movements by empowering civil society. This study examines NGOs' role in democratization in Indonesia during the reign of President Suharto and Egypt under the leadership of President Hosni Mubarak. In carrying out their functions, NGOs take a stand as a balancing force for the state and agents of community empowerment. The NGOs' elements struggle in producing an ideal democratic society order in these two countries facing their respective challenges. Some NGOs challenge building democratic society such as military domination, party hegemony systems, and robust state control over society. To encourage democratization in Indonesia and Egypt, NGOs have contributed to building democratic practices, improving democratic performance, strengthening civil rights, monitoring elections, and promoting corruption eradication. The strengthening of democracy by NGOs in Indonesia and Egypt has impacted building political openness, awareness of citizens' political rights, and pro-society public policies.

Recent trends in Democratic Peace theory have called into question the orthodox ‘separate democratic peace’ position that liberal states are peace-prone only in relations with other liberal states. This article seeks to recast the bases and scope (or parameters) of the relationship between liberalism – primarily left-liberalism – in domestic politics and peace-proneness in foreign affairs, to the effect that whilst this is manifest more broadly than conventionally understood, it is far from universal or undifferentiated. Whilst liberal ‘norms’ – as indicators of the legitimacy of force – are an important factor in determining when liberals will and will not support the use of force, liberals are also shown to have a higher threshold for the use of force than other groups on the mainstream domestic political spectrum (usually to the Right), indicating greater unwillingness to use force. The cases examined are reasonably neutral, not cherry-picked, in that they are drawn from the thre...

International Relations is one of several academic fields that emerged from around the turn of the 20 th Century. However, disagreements concerning whether IR qualifies as 'a discipline' persist, turning largely on whether disciplinarity requires only a dedicated set of scholarly institutions, journals and professional positions, or also a distinct and unique subject matter. Some see IR merely as a sub-discipline focused on a subset of power (under Political Science, for example). A recent argument asserts that IR could become an independent discipline by taking the coexistence of multiple societal units (the international) as its 'deep ontology'. Others reject IR's disciplinary status altogether on the grounds that disciplines police and coerce scholarship, in IR's case limiting it to a hegemonic set of concerns. A final position embraces disciplinarity as an imperfect way of managing inevitable power dynamics in scholarship, but emphasises that subject matters co-evolve with disciplines, through contestations and disagreement.

Guatemala’s politics has recently been shaken by the victory of anti-corruption crusader Bernardo Arévalo de León, which has brought fresh air of hope in a country ridden by high levels of poverty, corruption and criminal violence. But like or even more than in other countries, the electoral results are being contested by an astounded political and economic establishment unwilling to give its power away. The Organization of American States, a virtually moribund regional body that has proven unable to solve political crises and has at times even exacerbated them, has come back to the fore as the political forum where to coordinate a regional response.

This article argues that, since the end of the Cold War, the understanding of democratic norm promotion has shifted through three conceptually distinct and chronologically distinguishable stages: the early 1990s view that democratic norms would be universalized with the Cold War victory of liberal ideals and the spread of new global norms of good governance; the mid-to late-1990s view that barriers to the promotion of democratic norms could be understood as the product of state or elite self-interests; and the perspective dominant since the 2000s, that the promotion of democratic norms necessarily involves much deeper and more extensive external intervention in order to transform social institutions and societal practices. Through charting the shifts in the understanding of democratic norm promotion, this article seeks to highlight the problems inherent in norm promotion discourses that emphasize the importance of subjective agency, normative choices, and cultural and ideational frameworks of understanding. A key problem being that, in the downplaying of social and economic context, agency-based understandings tend to degrade the rational capacities of-and to exoticize and problematize-the non-Western subject. The social constructivist approach, which presupposes a closed or endogenous framework of societal reproduction, has thereby been a crucial paradigm through which Western democracy promotion discourses have shifted to emphasizing the subjective policy barrier posed by the allegedly 'nonliberal' mindset of the non-Western subject.

This desk review of case studies was produced as part of the project "Whole-of-Society Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding" (WOSCAP). In order to complement the other in-depth research cases with a broader view of EU interventions regarding conflict prevention and peacebuilding, this report focuses on cases in other contexts beyond the field research (on Georgia, Ukraine, Mali, and Yemen). The desk review collects documented lessons learned from selected policies in: Kosovo, Afghanistan, Central America (Honduras and Guatemala), and Sri Lanka. The EU has played a substantive role in Kosovo and Afghanistan, while it has played an important role in Sri Lanka and Central America.

Theoretische Grundlagen zur Erforschung der Prozesse bei Entscheidungstreffen im Sicherheitsrat…………………………………………………......10 1.1. Theoretische Grundlagen………………………………………………………………….…….10 1.2. Methodologische Vorgehenweise und Hypothesen…………………………….…..14 2. Institutionelle Eigenschaften des Sicherheitsrats………………………………………...19 2.1. Komposition des Sicherheitsrats………………………………………………………………19 2.2. Entscheidungsprozedur in dem Sicherheitsrat…………………………………………22 3. Die Konfrontationsperiode und die Kooperationsperiode des Sicherheitsrats in einer vergleichenden Perspektive………………………………………………………......25 3.1. Außenpolitische Motivation auf die staatliche Ebene in den 90er

As we approach the 10th anniversary of the World Summit Outcome now is the time to pause and ask the question what do scholars expect from the Responsibility to Protect? This article draws on non-Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) research into expectations to argue that in the aftermath of the intervention in Libya and non-intervention in Syria scholars have to manage RtoP expectations. In so doing, it introduces four types of expectations into the RtoP discourse: 'expectation gaps', 'expectation vacuums', 'expectation clouding', and 'inherited expectations'-the latter of which is this author's own contribution to the discourse. To illustrate the utility of the expectations approach, the article focuses on the debate over inconsistency in order to highlight the role of expectation gaps and inherited expectations. Going forward, it calls for further research into RtoP expectation management to be conducted and identifies key debates which need to be addressed. Ultimately, it advances an understanding of the RtoP that is inherently more sensitive to its limitations and possibilities.

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...

The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is the relevant framework for state responses to mass atrocities, which are ongoing in Syria. This article examines how that framework has been localized by civil society and the effects of that localization. Using an empirical case study of the UK's responses to Syrian refugees during 2014-16, the research demonstrates how state practice of a norm can affect civil society advo-cacy, which may have a deleterious effect on a norm's life cycle. The research also revealed that civil society is resisting a link between R2P and refugee protection in practice, despite states' international commitments to both and despite how both overlap in some cases. Two conclusions are reached. First, the research found a complex, iterative relationship between states and civil society. How the UK has understood and practiced R2P has directly affected how civil society contests and modifies R2P in response, despite the norm's relevance to the Syrian case. Rather than using advocacy and engagement with states to reconceptualize the norm to fit its broader remit, some civil society actors have rejected or modified the norm instead. This has effectively helped entrap R2P within a narrow understanding and has made it politically expedient to show support for the norm's aspirations implicitly rather than explicitly in the organizational discourse. Second, based on the results of this interdependent relationship, the political resistance against R2P is further entrenched, even when based upon the state's narrow understandings, which serve to marginalize the norm.

Over the past two decades, constructivist International Relations (IR) scholars have produced substantial knowledge on the diffusion and adoption of global norms, emphasising the role of Western norm entrepreneurs in constructing and promoting new norms to passive, generally non-Western, norm takers. An emergent literature on norm dynamics unsettles this narrative of linear progress, highlighting the agency of diverse actors, including the agency of non-Western norm entrepreneurs, in normative change. This article contributes to this recent norm research by exploring the normative agency of local actors in the Turkish context, who have actively engaged in normative contestation over the meaning of gender equality. More specifically, the article reveals the crucial role of a pro-government, conservative women's organisation in subverting global gender equality norms and in promoting a local norm of ‘gender justice’ as an alternative. The article furthers research on norm contesta...

The debate on norms and their effectiveness is taking place at the international political level in parallel to the debate on norms in norm scholarship. This thesis aimed to bring them together by applying a theoretical framework on norms to the prohibition of force norm that was contested by Russia in Crimea in 2014 and debated in the United Nations Security Council. The framework predicted that different types of norm contestation have different effects on the norm’s robustness – the latter is expected to strengthen when it predominantly faces applicatory contestation and to weaken when it faces validity contestation. Through qualitative document analysis, the research question on how Russia’s contestation of the prohibition of force norm affected the norm’s robustness was answered. This study firstly established the predominant type of contestation by Russia to be applicatory contestation. Differently than expected, this type of contestation was found to have increased the robust...

El estudio de las normas desde el enfoque teórico social constructivista de las Relaciones Internacionales parte de la premisa de la mutua cons- titución, entre agentes y estructura, de los hechos sociales resultado de significados intersubjetivos y acuerdos colectivos. A partir de los planteamientos de Alexander Wendt (1995, p. 73) se puede inducir que la estructura normativa es resultado del conocimiento compartido y de la interacción entre los actores que forman un marco ideacional en la estructura social, que logran brindar significados a las capacidades materiales y a las prácticas de poder.

Zusammenfassung: Dieser Aufsatz beleuchtet Parallelen zwischen den Aufstandsbewegungen der Makkabäer des 2. Jh. v. Chr. und der Vorgänger des sog. ,Islamischen Staates' (IS) im zeitgenössischen Irak. In beiden Fällen ringen religiös-politische Akteure um Macht und weichen dabei nicht vor dem Einsatz von Gewalt zurück, die mit religiösen Werten legitimiert wird. Im Sinne einer theoretischen Schärfung des Begriffs "religiöser Nonkonformismus" werden im ersten Teil Strategien diskutiert, die von religiös-politischen Akteuren gegenüber etablierten Inhabern politischer und religiöser Macht benutzt werden. Diese dienen zur Abgrenzung vom sozialen Umfeld sowie zur Konsolidierung der eigenen Bewegung, bestimmter Normen, Werte und Ideen, und sind Artikulation eines wechselseitigen Ablehnungsverhältnisses auf Basis kultureller, religiöser und politischer Prämissen, das sich auch in gewaltvollen Auseinandersetzungen Bahn bricht. Der zweite Teil des Aufsatzes widmet sich einer Betrachtung der Bewegungen selbst. Hierbei wird deutlich, dass eine Gegenüberstellung beider Fälle trotz des historisch großen Abstandes auf der Ebene der Positionierungen der Bewegungen in ihrem gesellschaftlich-politischen Umfeld, ihrer Selbstlegitimation als Bewahrer bestimmter Traditionen und Repräsentanten einer offenbarten Ordnung sowie in Bezug auf die Anwendung physischer Gewalt zur Durchsetzung ihrer Ansprüche sinnvoll ist. Neben einer Auseinandersetzung mit äußeren Mächten gilt vor allem die Konfrontationen mit dem ,inneren Feind', einem Konglomerat all jener, die in den Augen der Makkabäer bzw. der Ǧihādisten die Gemeinschaft der Rechtgläubigen unterwandern und somit den "Bund mit Gott" gefährden, als wesentliches Movens für das Handeln der Bewegungen. Die Akteure gehen so weit, dass sie sogar Gewalt gegen ihre eigenen Glaubensbrüder einsetzen, die sie durch die selektive Verwendung der Traditionen (vor allem der "heiligen Schriften") wie auchwenn es ihrem Ziel nütztdurch offensichtliche Änderungen dieser

This growing hostility was startling for a democracy and rights community that had felt the wind of history at its back ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall and had become accustomed to doors opening to its work rather than closing. When the pushback trend first made itself felt, it appeared to be a reaction to a particular juncture in international politics. President George W. Bush's use of democracy promotion as a frame for the U.S.-led military intervention in Iraq and the U.S. war on terror more generally (with its emphasis on Bush's "Freedom Agenda") changed many people's views of the democracy promotion enterprise. Western democracy assistance was no longer seen as a post-Cold War effort to foster a globalizing set of political values, but instead as the hard political edge of a newly militaristic, interventionist U.S. geostrategy.

Critics of US democracy-promotion strategies of the last 20 years ask: what kind of democracy is promoted by US public agencies and associated nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), how is it promoted, and for what purpose(s)? This paper draws on interviews with NGO, USAID, and UN representatives, gathered in Egypt in 2001, to describe the fate of Egyptian women's advocacy NGOs seeking to implement the pro-democracy platform of action of the 1994 UN International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD). It offers some support for critics' contentions both that external (here USAID) pro-democracy interventions may actually obstruct democratization, and that the instrumental nature of US democracy promotion may mean that such activities are quickly eliminated or downgraded when they conflict with more primary US policy goals.

The United Nations Security Council (UNSC), as the only legitimate dispenser of humanitarian intervention, is limited in its effectiveness by the veto powers afforded to the Permanent Five members (P5). Various reform agendas have been attempted over the years, and all have failed; for the most part because any such reform would limit the current level of international control that the veto affords the P5, and yet those reforms would also require P5 approval before they could be enacted.
The solution to this can be the normative rise of regional peacekeeping solutions that don’t merely seek to execute resolutions by themselves, but actually bypass United Nations (UN) approval and UN processes altogether. This would, in effect, take away the control over international actions that the P5 members currently hold with the veto power. By simply ignoring the UNSC, the UNSC will be forced to accept the complete loss of power associated with that behaviour, or conversely choose to reform themselves in order to retain a diminished share of their original power. Ignoring the United Nations Security Council might just be the only means to reforming it.

This article introduces the special issue and identifies three key contributions. First, RtoP advocates are right to mark the progress that has been made, but that should not – and generally does not – lead norm diffusers to rest on their laurels or to fall into a complacency that sees moral progress as inevitable. Second, the burden of concrete protection practices – whether they be reflected in contributions to peacekeeping missions or the granting of asylum – is being unfairly distributed across international society. This hierarchy is potentially destabilising and it demands that the great powers – or those laying claim to that identity – recognise their ‘special responsibility to protect’. Third, the great powers do have an important responsibility to reconcile the demands of human protection and international peace and security. It is difficult to reconcile these if we look narrowly at the former in terms of intervention, especially military intervention. Reiterating RtoP to r...

principal investigator and author of the report, would like to thank Aída Romero Jiménez for her editorial assistance, translation, and administrative support for this project and this document. He also wishes to thank the entire Center for Latin American & Latino Studies (CLALS) team for its support, especially its director, Eric Hershberg, Professor Fulton Armstrong, and other anonymous reviewers for their comments on prior drafts. For more information on our project, you can visit our webpage: https://www.american.edu/centers/latin-american-latino-studies/prospects-for-an-International-Commission-against-Impunity-and-Corruption-in-El-Salvador-Lessonsfrom-Neighboring-Countries-in-Central-America.cfm CICIG and MACCIH were innovative attempts to reduce exclusionary governance by a restricted group of elites, to enhance democratic governance, and to model holding even the well-connected and powerful to account.

This special issue explores norm diffusion, contestation and localisation in the contexts of political transition in general and postwar peacebuilding specifically. It engages with critical moments in which international diffusion endeavours meet local politics of norm contestation in societies undergoing postwar and/or post-authoritarian transitions. The 'third wave' of norm research offers an agency-based approach to the negotiation and contestation of the meaning of norms that is consistent with work in peacebuilding studies on the meeting between international norms and local realities in postwar contexts. By honing in on the 'normative powers' of local agents, their perspectives and capacities, and how these contribute to norm construction, the special issue provides theoretical and conceptual advances to capture these transition processes in the context of the Western Balkans.

This paper identifies and describes two new norm-based strategies for institutional change to address intractable social problems. In both strategies, advocates “foreground” and criticize norms supporting the institutional status quo before either promoting an alternative existing norm via normative reframing of the issue, or creating and promoting an entirely new norm via normative innovation to build support for new institutional arrangements. Drawing on examples of institutional change addressing the problems of climate change and violence against women, the analysis illustrates how these strategies are especially effective in the face of opposition from vested interests or problematic existing norms.

This article contributes to the body of theory and argumentation that challenges the standard tendency of compliance-centrism in international law scholarship and practice, including in the study of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and its relationship with African states. It does so in three ways. Firstly, it suggests targeted analytical focus on noncompliance, which is relatively under-researched and theorised despite more than three decades of compliance literature in international law (IL) and international relations (IR). Secondly, the article deproblematises noncompliance by shifting the focus of legal debate around the noncompliance of some African states with the ICC towards alternative normative interpretation. It proposes that doing so advances an understanding of these states' actions as pro-active contestation thus allowing for the effective challenging and critiquing of the normative construction, interpretation and application of international criminal law (ICL). By drawing attention to normative processes in international legal intercourse, this article presents a deeper and alternative comprehension of some African states' choices in relation to ICL. Thirdly, the article fills the gaps of most compliance approaches from IL and IR by synthesising progressive IR theory into the service of a TWAIL argument. It adds to the growing number of academic voices influencing approaches regarding the critical analysis of significant global concepts such as (non)compliance, immunity, sovereignty, universality and the hegemonic power exercised over the Third World through IL. Such an approach shines a spotlight on the perspectives of states in the Global South that have previously been excluded in the construction and reconstruction of international norms.

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 makes the case for why we should turn to studying democracy promotion negotiation, outlines the research questions guiding this special issue, identifies overarching findings and summarizes the individual contributions. After outlining the rationale for more attention to the issue of negotiation, which we understand as a specific form of interaction between external and local actors in democracy promotion, we outline three basic assumptions informing our research: (1) Democracy promotion is an international practice that is necessarily accompanied by processes of negotiation. (2) These negotiation processes, in turn, have an impact upon the practice and outcome of democracy promotion. (3) For external democracy promotion to be mutually owned and effective, genuine negotiations between 'promoters' and 'local actors' are indispensable; the term 'genuine' here being understood as including a substantial exchange on diverging values and interests. The article, then, introduces the three research questions for this agenda, concerning the issues on the negotiation table, the parameters shaping negotiation processes, and the results of democracy promotion negotiation. We conclude by presenting an overview of the overarching findings of the special issue as well as with brief summaries of the individual contributions.

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...