Unlocking the agency of the governed: contestation and norm dynamics

Abstract

International Relations (IR) research on the translation and appropriation of international norms emphasises both the role of local agency and the fundamental malleability of norms. However, these perspectives cannot unlock the full agency of the governed as they limit agents’ effects on norms to incremental changes at the margins. We suggest transcending the distinction between the local and the global by taking practices of contestation as constitutive for normative agency. In such a perspective, we can differentiate types of contestatory practices and analyse how they affect norms.

Keywords:

• Norm research
• norm translation
• normativity
• contestation
• agency
• practice

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the guest editors of this Special Issue, Anke Draude and Thomas Risse, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their many helpful comments during the review process.

Notes

1. Checkel, “Why Comply?” 561.

2. For example, Sikkink, “Beyond the Justice Cascade.”

3. Acharya, “How Ideas Spread”; Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence; Zwingel, Translating International Women’s Rights; see Berger, “Linked in translation,” in this collection.

4. Großklaus, “Appropriation and the Dualism of Human Rights.”

5. See Draude and Risse in this collection. This includes, according to the other contributions to this collection – but is not limited to – a broad array of actors ranging from regional organisations, to national governments, to non-state actors. Accordingly, the locus of their practices of contestation can vary from local settings to fora at international organisations.

6. For early works on norms and norm emergence in IR, see Kratochwil and Ruggie, “International Organization”; Nadelmann, “Global Prohibition Regimes”; Price, “A Genealogy of the Chemical Weapons Taboo”; Klotz, Norms in International Relations; and Finnemore, National Interests in International Society .

7. Finnemore and Sikkink, “International Norm Dynamics and Political Change”; see IO website, http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=INO, (accessed: 20 July, 2017).

8. Checkel, “Why Comply?” 561.

9. Engelkamp et al., “Office Hours”; Epstein, “Stop Telling Us How to Behave”; Zwingel, “How Do Norms Travel?” 116; see forum in International Theory, Epstein, “The Postcolonial Perspective.”

10. Acharya, “How Ideas Spread”; Epstein, “Stop Telling Us How to Behave”; Zwingel, “How Do Norms Travel?”

11. Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence.

12. See Zimmermann, “Same Same or Different?”

13. Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence, 224.

14. See Berger, “Linked in translation,” in this collection.

15. Draude and Risse in this collection.

16. See Engelkamp et al., “Office Hours”; and Epstein, “Stop Telling Us How to Behave.”

17. Acharya, “How Ideas Spread”; Acharya, Whose Ideas Matter?

18. Acharya, “How Ideas Spread,” 245.

19. Capie, “Localization as Resistance”; Capie, “The Responsibility to Protect Norm in Southeast Asia”; Dembinski and Schott, “Regional Security Arrangements as a Filter for Norm Diffusion”; Jetschke and Rüland, “Decoupling Rhetoric and Practice”; Williams, “The ‘Responsibility to Protect’ Norm Localisation, and African International Society”; Aharoni, “Internal Variation in Norm Localization”; and Vaughn and Dunne, “Leading from the Front.”

20. Boesenecker and Vinjamuri, “Lost in Translation?”; and Zwingel, “How Do Norms Travel?”

21. Zimmermann, “Same Same or Different?”

22. Levitt and Merry, “Vernacularization on the Ground”; Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence; for latest research in IR on legal translation see Brake and Katzenstein, “Lost in Translation?”

23. Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence.

24. Zwingel, Translating International Women’s Rights; see also Zwingel, “Women’s rights norms,” in this collection.

25. Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence, 1.

26. Ibid., 3.

27. Ibid., 5.

28. Ibid., 220.

29. Ibid., 4, 224.

30. Zwingel, Translating International Women’s Rights, 23.

31. Ibid., 31.

32. Ibid., 23 (our emphasis).

33. Ibid., 223.

34. Of course, uses of the term ‘appropriation’ differ widely. Some of the uses are more in line with the norm translation and localization research described above. See Lorentzen, “Norm Appropriation through Policy Production”, in this collection. This section deals with a specific reading of appropriation as resistance.

35. Acharya, “How Ideas Spread,” 253.

36. Großklaus, “Appropriation and the Dualism of Human Rights,” 1254.

37. Großklaus, “Appropriation and the Dualism of Human Rights,” 1255; and see Pereira, “Appropriating ‘Gender’ and ‘Empowerment’”.

38. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 83.

39. Acharya, “Norm Subsidiarity and Regional Orders,” 96.

40. Ibid., 97 (emphasis in original).

41. Capie, “Localization as Resistance”; Jetschke and Rüland, “Decoupling Rhetoric and Practice”; Williams, “The ‘Responsibility to Protect’ Norm Localisation, and African International Society”; and Rüland, “The Limits of Democratizing Interest Representation,” 237.

42. Which they actually are in the postcolonial reading of appropriation.

43. Chorev, “Changing Global Norms through Reactive Diffusion”; see also Special Section ‘Principles from the Periphery’ in Global Governance 20 (3) and Zimmermann, “Beyond Diffusion.”

44. For example, Held, “Democratic Accountability and Political Effectiveness”; Nanz and Steffek, “Global Governance, Participation and the Public Sphere”; and Zürn, “Democratic Governance Beyond the Nation-State.”

45. See Wiener, “Agency of the Governed in Global International Relations,” in this collection, for example.

46. Bob, The Global Right Wing.

47. Ibid., 5.

48. Ibid., 7.

49. Cf., for example, the following quote: ‘The ferocity of differences suggests too that conflict, rather than persuasion and cooperation, should take pride of place in studies of global governance.’ ibid., 15.

50. Ibid., 6.

51. Sandholtz and Stiles, International Norms and Cycles of Change, 3.

52. Yet, in contrast to the sober perspective taken by Bob, Sandholtz and Stiles still argue that these disputes tend to evolve in the direction of a more liberal world. Sandholtz and Stiles, International Norms and Cycles of Change, 3.

53. Wiener, A Theory of Contestation.

54. Wiener, The Invisible Constitution of Politics.

55. Wiener, A Theory of Contestation, 6, 7.

56. Ibid., 33, 41, 68.

57. Deitelhoff, “Scheitert die Norm der Schutzverantwortung?”; Wiener, The Invisible Constitution of Politics.

58. Wiener, A Theory of Contestation, 39; for a discussion see Wolff and Zimmermann, “Between Banyans and Battle Scenes.”

59. Wiener, A Theory of Contestation, 1; see Wiener, “Agency of the Governed in Global International Relations,” in this collection.

60. Cf. Bueger and Gadinger, “The Play of International Practice,” 456.

61. Adler and Pouliot, “International Practices,” 20.

62. Cf. Doty, “Aporia,” 383, 384.

63. Ibid., 385.

64. Deitelhoff and Zimmermann, Things We Lost in the Fire. From a slightly different angle, Jennifer Welsh distinguishes between substantive and procedural contestation arguments. Welsh, “Implementing the ‘Responsibility to Protect’”, 130–5. Similarly, recent practice-oriented research has distinguished between thick and thin forms of contestation. Adler-Nissen and Pouliot, “Power in Practice,” 895.

65. Günther, The Sense of Appropriateness, 6, 7; and see also Habermas, Between Facts and Norms.

66. Günther, The Sense of Appropriateness, 70.

67. Chayes and Chayes, “On Compliance,” 188, 189.

68. See Sandholtz and Stiles, International Norms and Cycles of Change, 4; Venzke, How Interpretation Makes International Law.

69. Günther, The Sense of Appropriateness, 57.

70. Peterson, “Creativity in Application Discourses,” 221.

71. Wolf and Scholz, “Health before Patents.”

72. For a discussion of sociological approaches to deviance in IR and International Law see Adler-Nissen, “Stigma Management in International Relations”; and Hirsch, Invitation to the Sociology of International Law, Chapter 5.

73. See Barnes, “The ‘War on Terror,’”103.

74. Venzke, How Interpretation Makes International Law, 6 (emphasis in original).

75. Badescu and Weiss, “Misrepresenting R2P and Advancing Norms”; Acharya, “The R2P and Norm Diffusion”; and Deitelhoff, “Scheitert die Norm der Schutzverantwortung?”

76. Beyond outright rejection of a certain norm, validity contestation can arise in different situations deriving from a dialectical relationship with applicatory contestation. Validity contestation can, and maybe should, arise if applicatory contestation has reshaped the norm over time and its normativity is in need of renewed justification of its validity. Peterson, “Creativity in Application Discourses,” 228.

77. Durkheim, The Rules of the Sociological Method, 102.

78. Duvall, and Chowdhury, “Practices of Theory,” 348.

79. Also as in-group creation in Simmel and Rammstedt, Soziologie, 684.

80. Deitelhoff, “Scheitert die Norm der Schutzverantwortung?”

81. On such basic group creation functions, see Georg Simmel’s conflict theory in Stark, “Die Konflikttheorie von Georg Simmel,” 85; and Dubiel, “Integration durch Konflikt?”

82. Arcudi, Der Internationale Strafgerichtshof auf der Anklagebank.