Much mainstream constructivist research in IR frames explanations in terms of norms (Hoffmann, Reference Hoffmann2010; McCourt, Reference McCourt2016), approached as widely held rules about right action, to account for puzzling phenomena in world politics. However, what scholars call ‘norms’ are rarely consistent, singular social things, instead of comprising entangled, often internally inconsistent arrays of practices and standards, undergoing ongoing revision and contestation by the people enacting them. To talk of norms may thus be problematic, or at least analytically unhelpful, when those arrays of practices and principles are unsettled, in unusual internal tension, or undergoing rapid evolution as a result of internal or external pressures. Put differently, if rules, values, and institutions are changing fast, and it is not clear why an explanation may come only by focusing on a heterogeneous array of social processes rather than some agglomeration of the same into ‘norms’, old and new.
As contemporary ethno-nationalist movements seek to reframe politics across the global north, by challenging and recalibrating their normative orientations, these effects are especially important. These challenges, and challengers, span different contexts and have different agendas, but collectively they may trigger the evolution – or erosion – of a host of long-standing arrangements in hugely consequential ways. In these situations, observers may see rapid transformations in the status and content of what is right, proper, desirable, and authoritative, and yet be unable to easily identify whether this is the change of a norm, the replacement of one norm with another, or the simple erosion of a norm.
Consider three examples of recent United States security policies. The use of ‘enhanced interrogation’ methods appears to many observers to be a case of torture,Footnote 1 and thus a violation of the prohibition thereon (McKeown, Reference McKeown2009; Panke and Petersohn, Reference Panke and Petersohn2011) – in other words, ‘norm violation’ and perhaps even ‘norm death’. Yet proponents of those methods did not, and to this day do not, claim that the prohibition on torture is illegitimate, or that it was in their case acceptable to engage in torture. Rather, they claim that their methods were not transgressive – that what they did was not torture at all (John Rizzo, interview with the author). To refer to this as a case of norm violation or erosion thus means passing judgment on the validity of this claim, substituting methodological fiat for an anthropologically sensitive investigation into what involved actors actually were contesting or seeking to transform. A similar dynamic may be seen in the multinational rise of private military and security contractors in warzones: while some scholars claim this is a violation of a norm prohibiting mercenarism (Petersohn, Reference Petersohn2014), practitioners themselves are adamant that these contractors are not mercenaries (Christopher Mayer, interview with author), and that mercenaries continue to be rightfully excluded from conflict zones (Avant, Reference Avant2016). Again, the same dynamic appears in considering whether the use of drones to engage in targeted killing, now a staple of United States security policy, constitutes a violation of a prohibition on assassination. Those behind the development of the targeted killing program argue that it does not, because no such prohibition against assassination should exist but rather that assassination is just not the same thing (Pratt, Reference Pratt2018). To claim that these are cases of norm change or violation requires scholars to take an a priori position on the very issue of political controversy they are researching – for to argue that a prohibition is being overturned is not an evaluatively neutral stance. Moreover, these cases feature the gradual improvization and institutionalization of new technical and professional skills and standards, in ways not just captured by the idea of contestation over what a rule or principle implies. Clearly something is normatively different, but the features of the cases make it hard to express this difference in norms-talk.
If a scholar cannot easily distinguish between these possibilities, and is instead confronted with a fluctuating tapestry of practices and principles, it becomes unhelpful to analyze changes through the language of norm emergence, cascades, and other such norms-talk common in the field – all of which, explicitly or tacitly, treats norms as units and thus requires discrete norms be denoted, often in advance of analysis. Attempting to do so risks dividing institutions and actions up in ways that are not reflected or respected in practice, obscuring how putatively similar norms can mean different things depending on time and place. Moreover, an increasing body of scholarship in the field oriented around practices and relationality is inconsistent with the ontological treatment of norms as distinct social objects, and in many cases has avoided discussion of norms altogether (Jackson and Nexon, Reference Jackson and Nexon1999; Adler and Pouliot, Reference Adler and Pouliot2011; see also McCourt, Reference McCourt2016). This yields accounts of thoroughly normative things – values, conventions, customs, and cultures (and transformations thereof) – detached from those constructivist conversations focused on how norms drive outcomes in IR.
To address these problems, this article draws on pragmatist and relational social theory to provide a new ontology of normativity, as a package of causes and effects in international politics, meaning forces that both shape outcomes and are themselves outcomes, undergoing maintenance and transformation alike. I offer an alternative concept in place of the norm: the normative configuration, defined as an arrangement of ongoing, interacting practices establishing action-specific regulation, value orientation, and avenues of contestation. All ‘norms’ are normative configurations, and while analytical benefits can and have accrued from their ‘arrestation’ (Jackson and Nexon, Reference Jackson and Nexon1999) into the concept of norm, these benefits are contingent upon historically particular case features. Scholars should also be able to break norms down into their constituent, moving relations – de-reified – and explore their normativity itself as the outcome of particular kinds of practices and processes that may be rearranged in a wide range of ways.
I begin by examining how scholars have approached norms and normativity, tracing the analytical strengths and limits of their concepts. I argue that IR norms scholarship has mainly studied how norms emerge and change. However, by treating norms as discrete objects, it has approached them epidemiologically: as traveling and evolving packages of moral information. This reifies important dimensions of social action and interaction responsible for establishing normative force; that is, it takes multiple processes of action and interpretation and gathers them into fixed units. On examination, these processual factors are central to implementing and embedding normative valuation or force in particular practices and institutional arrangements. While missing from most theoretical formulations, I find this relational and processual account already tacitly at work in recent constructivist research. Indeed, it has been a fertile basis for establishing a robust research program – one virtually definitive of the positive constructivist project in the field. Nevertheless, I argue that there is a good reason to develop an alternative concept, provide that alternative can fulfill certain conditions.
The second part of the paper details the alternative. Drawing on pragmatist and relational social theory, I develop ‘normative configurations’ as a concept for understanding how normativity operates and changes. I proceed by examining what social theories of norms exist to do, analytically or ontologically, and what an alternative to them should therefore also do. On the basis of this synthetic reading of social theory, I base normative configurations on four ‘propositions’: that normativity is embedded in action (rather than being distinct from it); that normativity provides both ends and means for action (rather than providing only ends); that normativity links ends and means recursively (rather than ends influencing means but not vice versa); and that normativity crystalizes into institutional arrangements through the stabilization of practices (rather than through practice-independent discursive or formal constitutive processes). Together these wagers can orient investigations of normative influences and changes without referencing the movements or life cycles of norms.
Third, I outline a three-stage methodological procedure for examining changes in normative configurations over time: de-reification, attributing agency, and tracing transactions. This approach lets one break an apparent rule, principle, or value down into its component relations and processes, determine where contestation or weak institutionalization generates locations of instability, and track unfolding mechanisms of transformation. I situate this procedure within existing IR projects to develop practice-centric methods of analysis.
In the final section, I discuss how my proposed approach fits with the sympathetic projects of existing relational and practice-focused IR scholars. In particular, I argue that the approach to normativity and action developed here is consistent with the practice and relational ‘turns’, while contributing to them a potent vocabulary for studying normative transformation. Perhaps most notably, it offers the prospect of greater synthesis of mainstream (i.e., norms-focused) and critical constructivism. It makes the theoretical goods and themes of the norms research program ontologically tractable to those working from relational and practice-theoretic approaches, while also introducing the critiques offered by those approaches to the broader community of norms scholars.
IR and the norms research program
Normativity interests scholars across the social sciences and humanities. The concept of ‘norm’, in various forms, enjoys widespread currency not just in sociology and political science, but in philosophy, psychology, economics, and anthropology, carrying a range of overlapping meanings, both within and across these fields.Footnote 2 Broadly, ‘norms’ may refer to values, mores, conventions, identities, classificatory schema, shared expectations of behavior, and associated practices (Moore, Reference Moore1993; Cancian, Reference Cancian1975; Bicchieri, Reference Bicchieri2005; Elster, Reference Elster2009), shaping actors' moral opinions and featuring in the processes of socialization and social regulation.
The study of norms has also been a central preoccupation of constructivist IR scholars. Scholars sought answers to the question ‘what do values, principles, and rules do in international politics?’ The history and direction of this research program can be understood in terms of waves. The first wave, mainly spanning the 1990s and early 2000s, brought the concept of norms, as a way to account for normativity, to a discipline otherwise consumed by rationalist debates over the comparable merits of neo-realism and neo-liberalism (Hoffmann, Reference Hoffmann2010). The earliest of this literature (see, among others, Kratochwil and Ruggie, Reference Kratochwil and John Gerard1986, Kratochwil, Reference Kratochwil1989; Nadelmann, Reference Nadelmann1990; Finnemore, Reference Finnemore and Katzenstein1996a, Reference Finnemoreb; Barkin and Cronin, Reference Barkin and Cronin1994; Katzenstein, Reference Katzenstein1996) sought mainly to establish the salience of a normative dimension to the conduct of international politics. At the forefront of the first wave of this research program were major studies into the emergence and spread of prohibitions, such as on nuclear weapons (Tannenwald, Reference Tannenwald1999), chemical weapons (Price, Reference Price1995), and slavery (Keck and Sikkink, Reference Keck and Sikkink1998). By the end of the 1990s, scholars had developed complex models of norm ‘life cycles’ (Finnemore and Sikkink, Reference Finnemore and Sikkink1998) and of the reasons why some norms endure while others disappear or fail to become prominent in the first place (see, among others, Klotz, Reference Klotz1995; Keck and Sikkink, Reference Keck and Sikkink1998; Bernstein, Reference Bernstein2000, Reference Bernstein2001).
The second wave, beginning in the early 2000s, partially de-reified norms, and attended to their dynamic nature more fully than the scholarship of the first wave. Actors themselves played a more prominent causal role, contesting and interpreting norms rather than passively internalizing them through processes of socialization (Acharya, Reference Acharya2004; Cortell and Davis, Reference Cortell and Davis2005; Sandholtz, Reference Sandholtz2008; Wiener, Reference Wiener2004, Reference Wiener2008, 2009; Krook and True, Reference Krook and True2012; Hofferberth and Weber, Reference Hofferberth and Weber2015). Scholars of this wave studied norm change at a finer resolution, temporal or institutional, of analysis, whereby a single norm may be interpreted or manifested differently across social time and space. In this literature, norm change arises out of a temporary settling of ongoing contestation and interpretation, which, this work argues, can arise out of anything from a significant shift in institutional culture to executive imposition. Wiener (Reference Wiener2009) offers the most articulate direct theorization of norms here, advising scholars to focus on ‘meaning-in-use’, contingency, and to focus on the ‘micro-level…settings of interaction’ (178). Hofferberth and Weber (Reference Hofferberth and Weber2015) propose something similar, arguing that norms be approached through an ‘interpretive’ methodology (75) whereby they serve as sense-making and linguistic devices. However, contextualizing norms in this way still retains problems of reification. When norms are entirely products of interpretation, they become the epiphenomena of ‘cultural practices’ (Wiener, Reference Wiener2009, 181) or are otherwise simply focal points of discourse, and when they are treated as causes or as features of social structures with their own qualities, they do not differ from the ‘norms-as-units’ ontology underlying first wave norms scholarship. In other words, the turn toward contestation and interpretation may dereify norms, but only by relinquishing the robust causal role normativity can play outside of discourse.
The recent work of Wiener, Hofferberth, and Weber, and others studying norms in a similar way reflects increasing, though still limited engagement or convergence with critical constructivist research. Critical constructivists, taking after Kratochwil (Reference Kratochwil1989) and Onuf (Reference Onuf1989) rather than ‘soft constructivism’ (Wendt, Reference Wendt1999), have long examined discursive processes of normative interpretation (Epstein, Reference Epstein2008; Towns, Reference Towns2012), but their work has largely remained on the margins of more conventional norms research – in a sense, as part of ‘the constructivism that was not’ (Jackson, Reference Jackson2012). They have studied the ways interpretation and practice establish the ends and ethics of the conduct of world politics, but not how one norm may come to replace another, spread throughout the international system, and influence state conduct – the processes of greatest interest to the first wave.
The most recent scholarship on norms still struggles to make room for agency, usually understood as some personal capacity for moral judgment and autonomy of action, without reducing its object to processes of interpretation alone (Bucher, Reference Bucher2014). Perhaps the most sociologically sophisticated of this work is that of Schmidt's (Reference Schmidt2014) pragmatist theory of norm change. He aligns with the relationalism proposed by Hofferberth and Weber (Reference Hofferberth and Weber2015) but assigns norms a role in practice that goes beyond cognition and discourse. By identifying a norm with a practice, then providing a theory of how practices transform that defines the normative implications thereof, he concretizes norm change in a way that considers contestation and interpretation (for all practices undergo these things) but also agency (as the capacity of people for flexibility in action and judgment), and opens a theoretical door for a range of sociological perspectives on practice to contribute in new ways to the IR literature on norms. Pragmatist philosophy and social theory provide the conceptual basis for this identification, but Schmidt does not explore them to their full potential. First, he retains a more or less one-to-one relationship between a norm and its referent practice, which makes it harder to grasp shifting and often inconsistent arrangements of practices and principles, in ways that may not admit of neat reduction or translation. Second, the ‘mechanism’ of norm change Schmidt proposes does not explain why any one particular norm has changed, because it is a general theory of action – it is meta-theory, describing how any practices change, regardless of case. What it instead does is direct attention toward the dynamics of creativity, relationality, and evolutionary (rather than revolutionary) revision of what is normative.
The different strands of norms scholarship thus embrace a sort of ontological duality. Early work, employing a definition still in use in plenty of empirical work today, approaches norms as reified social objects: ‘standard[s] of appropriate behavior for actors’ (Keck and Sikkink, Reference Keck and Sikkink1998, 891), possessing both a subjective and inter-subjective dimension (Hoffmann, Reference Hoffmann2010), respectively, shaping actors' moral opinions and featuring in the processes of socialization and social regulation. Norms are features of the social world that guide people in how to live and make up the context for much of their life in the first place, and thus are discrete, causally efficacious ‘things’ (Krook and True, Reference Krook and True2012) that can feature in claims of cause and effect. To be sure, scholars have recognized that norms do not float freely, but are enmeshed in a given context. Finnemore, for example, avers ‘the importance of viewing norms not as individual ‘things’ floating atomistically in some international social space but rather as part of a highly structured social context…a fabric of interlocking and interwoven norms rather than individual norms of this or that’ (Reference Finnemore and Katzenstein1996a, 161). Nevertheless, by orienting analysis around specific norms, both in theory and in practice, the ultimate result is atomistic. Norms still end up existing as traveling units of moral information, embodied in social and psychological form, influencing the course of things.
Conversely, critical constructivists and some second-wave norms scholars approach norms as points of discursive contestation or orientation, which avoids reifying them but also significantly constrains their potential role in the explanations of change – here ‘norms’ change, but there are no consequences to this because they are the outcomes of underlying processes of interpretation. Rather, a change in a norm indicates that something else has changed, discursively or hermeneutically. In other words, the choice is between reification, to atomistic units, and reduction to other social-theoretic categories.
To be sure, many cases of institutional transformation involve breaks from the past, or revolve around distinct rules, principles, or values so pronounced and obvious in substance that they can be (and have been) productively explained through norms-talk. However, some cases of transformation, because they are uneven or internally inconsistent, span a heterogeneous set of practices, or are the outcome of a range of agendas and instruments, do not admit of neat division into old norms, new norms, norm entrepreneurs, and discourses of contestation revolving around the interpretation of a discrete standard or value.
Yet these kinds of cases are of great interest to relational and practice-theoretic IR scholars, whose focus on institutionally situated processes of evolution or transformation proceed from a more micro- and meso-level sensitivity to agency (see McCourt, Reference McCourt2016; Jackson and Nexon, Reference Jackson and Nexon1999; Adler and Pouliot, Reference Adler and Pouliot2011). Moreover, when relational IR does take a macro-sociological perspective, it does so often with attention to the dispersed and plastic nature of values and conventions (see, e.g. Nexon, Reference Nexon2009; Linklater, Reference Linklater2011), further limiting the usefulness of a ‘norms-as-things’ ontology, compared to one in which norms are de-reified into configurations of processes and relations of interaction. Indeed, relational and practice-theoretic IR research has thus largely left behind norms research for this reason (McCourt, Reference McCourt2016), for lack of an ontologically commensurate, analytically more helpful approach to norms and normativity. In the next section, I address this by proposing one such approach.
From norms to normativity configurations
I propose a concept better suited to tracing complex processes or practices establishing normativity and generating transformations: the ‘normative configuration’. It escapes the predominant deontic or ‘logic of appropriateness’ view (March and Olsen, Reference March and Olsen1998), whereby ‘norms’ serve as the cognitive underpinnings of rule-following or morally-driven action, provide ends or direction based on values (Hofferberth and Weber, Reference Hofferberth and Weber2015; see also Parsons, Reference Parsons1937). Nor does it treat norms as emergent patterns or instrumentally established coordination principles, as rationalists do, in ways that offer no traction, by definition, on the obvious ethical character of many empirical cases.Footnote 3 These views are caught between the ‘upward conflation’ of voluntarism and a ‘downward conflation’ of over-emphasizing the determining properties of structure (Archer, Reference Archer1995; see also Loyal, Reference Loyal2003), and obscure a heterogeneous array of social processes in which agency is distributed and change is inconsistent yet common. Drawing from pragmatist and relational social theory, I suggest an alternative that better captures the pathways of social regulation, how normativity is involved in the constitution of social arrangements and orders, and the reciprocal interplay of morality and instrumentality in action. It reveals the constellations that make it possible for normativity to fluctuate without constituting an episodic or self-evident change in institutionalized conventions.
The alternative I suggest builds on a small but potent set of existing criticisms of the norms research program. By placing situated creativity and a processual view of social relationships at the center of this approach, I join with Hofferberth and Weber (Reference Hofferberth and Weber2015) and with Wiener (Reference Wiener2008, Reference Wiener2014) in tracing the multi-dimensionality and interactivity of normative dynamics. Indeed, Hofferberth and Weber (Reference Hofferberth and Weber2015) themselves propose many of the theoretical moves that I argue for here, drawing on pragmatist theories of action (Joas, Reference Joas1996) and relational sociology (Emirbayer, Reference Emirbayer1997; Jackson and Nexon, Reference Jackson and Nexon1999) to try to access the dynamic processes of innovation and social interaction that constitute norms. However, by still retaining the concept of ‘norm’ as an entity in their theory, leave opaque the complex social relations establishing normativity as a causal force, and focus on interpretations of the norm in question, rather than on the practices out of which the appearance of stable and singular norms emerge. Building theories around the concept of the normative configuration goes beyond purely interpretive methods by locating the causal potential of normativity and of the forces that drive normative change.
The normativity of action
I propose that normativity exists within action. For constructivists, acts carry an implication of propriety – of their own goodness or rightfulness. In other words, almost nobody consciously does something without also thinking that there is a compelling or justifying reason for it, and those habits and practices that we perform without conscious thought are conditioned by learned standards of propriety. When an action is to any degree self-aware, it is joined with normative judgment and claim. Conversely, action, when aggregated and arranged in certain ways, provides the generative and disciplinary force for normativity in social orders in general. In this sense, the so-called ‘norms’ are not substantive objects in the world but momentary snapshots or settings of the ‘rules of the game’, anchoring social understandings and values for both scholars and their subjects alike, but open to transformation as ‘players’ continually renegotiate and reinvent them. Beneath seemingly settled regimes of human rights, sovereignty, and cooperation are a fractal of nested deliberate and accidental revision of practices and institutions, for status, for efficiency, or principle. Normativity is established, enforced, and interpreted by ongoing processes of social interaction.Footnote 4
This view grants normativity a pervasive and persistent role in the ongoing creation of society and subjects alike, as that aspect of action that goes beyond the purposes of the individual actor, and establishes seemingly independent or impersonal sources of meaning, value, and justification. If this is the case, normativity can only be understood alongside and through a more general theory of action, in which the normative and non-normative aspects of action are clearly defined and related to one-another. Normativity is a dimension of action, but so too is instrumentality, and moreover, normativity is both an ‘objective’ and forceful feature of the social world actors must account for in their strategies and habits, and a ‘subjective’ orientation toward particular values and ends. This yields a puzzle: how do we describe the potential for self-reformation and world-transformation definitive of agency, without neglecting the dispositional role that values and meanings play, both by orienting action around particular ends and by supplying a repertoire of known means? Or, put most simply, how are creativity, as the capacity to invent new worlds, and sociality, as the orientation toward meaningful collective life, knit together in practice?
Ultimately, this question can be answered only with a general theory of action. Yet this is a fractured and long-standing project,Footnote 5 and all positions lead to difficulties in accounting for all dimensions of normativity. Most theories of action – from Weber and Parsons to Goffman and Bourdieu – offer either an undersocialized (overly voluntaristic) or an oversocialized (overly deterministic) account of normativity. First and obviously, instrumental theories of action, such as those underpinning rationalist approaches (e.g. Olson, Reference Olson1965; Elster, Reference Elster1989a, Reference Elsterb) explicitly sanitize action of normativity, and are thus inadequate for studying normativity as a causal force. This is why, for example, Morrow (Reference Morrow2014) may explain the instrumental dynamic of reciprocity in military adherence to the laws of war, but lacks any account of why actors may feel it is right, proper, or humane to do so. Second, action theorists may taxonomize action into analytically distinct categories that provide traction on some cases but abstract increasingly far from human experience, or grant a normative dimension to only some acts.Footnote 6 This is precisely what occurs when, in IR, a ‘norms-based’ or ‘ideational’ explanation is seen as competing with a rationalist or ‘material’ one, as if actions could be exclusively one or the other. Together, these two problems obtain in the bulk of action theory,Footnote 7 and they make it hard to give an action-centric account of normativity.
The way around these problems lies in pragmatic or practice-focused strands of theorizing on action – in particular the approaches taken by Erving Goffman and Pierre Bourdieu. Goffman's studies of communication focus on its role in ‘strategic interaction’: game-like engagements between two or more parties in a ‘well-structured situation of mutual impingement where each party must make a move and where every possible move carries fateful implications for all parties’ (Reference Goffman1969, 100–101). While this view may at first sound overly instrumental, a careful examination of Goffman's central concept of the ‘interaction order’ shows that it pays considerable attention to normativity (Goffman, Reference Goffman1983). Normative commitments enable the strategic element of communication, as an essential component of the social terrain and a source of leverage upon all actors (Goffman, Reference Goffman1959, Reference Goffman1969). This approach explains a great deal about how even subordinate participation interactions entail recognition and agency – such as through managing their stigma (Adler-Nissen, Reference Adler-Nissen2014) or in diplomatic ‘pecking orders’ (Pouliot, Reference Pouliot2016). However, while it does weave together normative and instrumental dimensions to action, it cannot account for the genesis and transformation of values. This is partly due to a steadfastly micro-sociological focus, but also because Goffman's interest is in theorizing communicative exchanges rather than institutions, sparing him the need to navigate the problems of action theory more generally. In other words, Goffman shows the value of situated, performative views of action, but his approach is too ‘presentist’ to explain processes of change over time.
Bourdieu, who does theorize institutions, provides another promising angle on normativity in action: socially conditioned actors reproducing culture through habituated practices, situated in and oriented by a field of power relations between subjects (Bourdieu, Reference Bourdieu1977, Reference Bourdieu1993). This explains how actors develop values but may also change them, through maneuver that alters the contexts cultural production and economic competition (1993) – for example, by exploiting diplomatic alliance structures to build support for controversial interventions (Adler-Nissen and Pouliot, Reference Adler-Nissen and Pouliot2014). The critical disadvantage of Bourdieu is the strictly constrained self-awareness he assigns his actors, which does not allow for deliberate and self-conscious action; actors engage only tactically, and never consider or seek to change the broader social conditions generative of subjects in the first place (Bohman, Reference Bohman and Shusterman1999; Margolis, Reference Margolis and Shusterman1999; Depelteau, Reference Depélteau, Powell and Dépelteau2013). In other words, Bourdieu knits together normativity and instrumentality, accounts for order and history,Footnote 8 but does so by curtailing the liveliness and potential for self-awareness in action. In a sense, then, both Bourdieu and Goffman capture normativity in action, but from two opposing and incomplete perspectives; the former presents an over-socialized view of actors and the latter neglects socialization processes altogether. The result in both cases is a view of action inadequate for the task at hand, but which is nevertheless instructive.
The strengths and limitations of Goffman and Bourdieu suggest how best to theorist normativity in action. Both theorists ‘externalize’ normativity, treating it as a feature of the environment in which action takes place. In other words, Bourdieu's field and Goffman's interaction order describe the institutionalization of normativity without reifying it into discrete and autonomous social entities. At the same time, both miss the bidirectional constitution between ends and means, meaning that actors, in their theories, lack the deliberative capacity to act upon themselves as well as simply on one-another. Yet this sort of self-reformation is an evident feature of a number of historical cases,Footnote 9 and by treating it as a potential outcome of all action, both determinism and voluntarism can be avoided. Moreover, that possibility is also essential to most normative theorizing, as a society incapable of reflection upon the good has limited horizons of transformation.
A pragmatist view of action
Pragmatism offers a way to theorize normativity in action that does not suffer from the problems of those other approaches surveyed. A pragmatist theory of action begins not with willful actors, nor with the dispositional properties of social structures, but with a certain kind of relation: the transaction. Acts are transactions between the body, or organism, and its physical environment, stimulated by impulses shaped by evolution but underdetermined in their expression (Dewey, Reference Dewey1922, 127–130). The term ‘transaction’ here refers to the arrangements of unfolding processes which cannot be specified apart from one another, extending in time as well as space, and which, in the case of the organism and its environment, deny the independent pre-existence of either one (Dewey and Bentley, Reference Dewey and Bentley1949, 137). Acts ground human behavior and perception, and establish human experience as an ‘organized context of meanings and activities’ (Alexander, Reference Alexander1987, 133). In other words, acts are what knit things together, and they create the conditions for the emergence of mind and for the definition of the world.
Acts are often routinized. Dewey uses the term ‘habit’ for acts that take place with little conscious reflection, as ‘an acquired predisposition to ways or modes of response’ (Dewey, Reference Dewey1922, 42), which (contingently) manifests in similar though not identical acts across social time and space. But habits are more than simply expressions of acquired dispositions. They are part of the environment in which the organism lives and acts: they are ‘situational structures rather than individual reflexes, psychic associations, or repeated actions’ (Alexander, Reference Alexander1987, 142). As a form of action, habits possess ‘causal efficacy’ as both a medium and an outcome of the ongoing organism–environment transactions. They are part of a relational process of adjustment to the contingencies of experience, and generate both self and world.
Habits, however, are not always sub-intentional or unconscious, and can be subject to modification. When habit is interrupted or inhibited, the organism must select from a wide range of mutually exclusive responses. The way by which it does so is through reflective self-awareness, from the consideration and selection of alternatives (Hildebrand, Reference Hildebrand2008, 28–30). Thus, unlike in theories of practice or habit where action lacks conscious intentionality, in pragmatism action moves in and out of self-awareness, and cognition occurs at both levels.
This approach rests on a peculiar theory of mind: that it exists in the doing rather than as a distinct faculty applied to action and decision as needed. In Dewey's own words:
[Mind] never denotes anything self-contained, isolated from the world of persons and things, but is always used with respect to situations, events, objects, persons and groups…Mind is primarily a verb (my emphasis; Dewey, Reference Dewey and Boydston1987, 268).
Put more simply, action is what produces minds because minds are actions: they are ongoing processes of reflection and habit modification, directed at coping with the inhibitive or indeterminate features of the world. For humans, mind is therefore social, because we live in a world of other people.
This philosophical foundation makes possible a pragmatic view of agency – not as something made specifically possible by structured relations of enablement and constraint but arising from an inherent human capacity for continual innovation. Agency does not refer to a capacity of individual persons to act with freedom or flexibility, but of action itself to change the world. In other words, agency is the power of action, rather than the power for action. That capacity receives its expression in the relationship between action and its ends:
[New] goals will arise on the basis of newly available means.…This reciprocal process between means and ends structures action. It anchors the notion of goals firmly in the action process itself and argues against the external setting of goals as advocated in teleological theories of action. This allows one to perceive perception and cognition not as acts preceding action but as part of the action process that is inherently connected to the situational context (Joas and Beckert, Reference Joas, Beckert and Turner2001, 273).
Thus a pragmatist view of agency refers to the ongoing adaptive process, where organisms become agents by acting within an environmental context that both circumscribes and constitutes them, establishing creative possibilities for dynamic subjects constituted by action and changing along with it.
A pragmatist focus on evolving transactions covers both the creativity of action and the way it is shaped, oriented, and directed by historically determined, institutionalized social settings, imposing pressures and offering opportunities. The process of inhibition and reorientation of habit explains both how normativity persists in familiar forms and also how it may change rapidly in form or content. It grants actors the possibility of significantly reinterpreting their goals and obligations without denying the value-laden nature of both. Yet it lacks a well-specified theory of the social environment; the pragmatist view of action focuses on the capacities of the organism to adapt, but does not offer any clear way of describing the institutional settings in relation to which adaption occurs, nor of grasping political struggle between persons and groups. In the next sub-section, I suggest a way of doing so.
From action to the normative configuration
By analyzing social arrangements through the lens of pragmatist action theory, a certain conception of their normative dimensions emerges: the concept of the normative configuration. It refers to the same kinds of things that scholars have called ‘norms’ and their effects, but it replaces that vocabulary with an alternative on – for new language often carries with it new sensitivities and opportunities for novel theories. Normative configurations are arrangements of ongoing, interacting practices establishing action-specific regulation, value orientation, and avenues of contestation. In other words, they are processual, heterogeneous, and provide both ends and means to actors, by directing action toward the attainment of particular outcomes and by treating certain kinds of symbols and performances as authoritative. Not every arbitrary assortment of practices constitutes a normative arrangement by this definition, but every practice is a necessary part of one, as normative arrangements provide direction and cultural depth to social life. Hence the task for the investigator is to find which practices come together to generate a particular set of regulative outcomes, and to study in particular their normativity-producing dimensions.
This definition rests on four propositions about the dimensions of normativity distilled from the foregoing discussion of action and the social world. First, as normativity inheres in the action process, the mechanisms of normativity are the ways it features in evolving transactions linking actors to one another and to their worlds. Second, as normativity provides subjects with ends, with means, and with the symbols, performances, and social skills through which to link the latter to the former, it inscribes or institutionalizes culture into the action environment. This allows it – an outcome of action – to in turn become a component of subsequent action. Third, normativity enables the recursive transformation of ends and means. It orients action around certain ends but also makes possible ethical transformation, as ends are rarely consistent, featuring competing imperatives and values-in-tension which must be resolved through creative problem-solving. Fourth, normativity crystalizes into institutional regimes. This is what enables observers to speak of seemingly enduring ‘norms’. Collectively, these wagers provide a meta-theoretical approach for understanding what normativity is and how it works, and provide a basic analytical architecture for examining historically specific processes of social change.
I base these propositions on an examination of the strengths and weaknesses of a number of relational and practice theorists who wed their theory of action with one of social order. Pragmatism implies that social arrangements are not only an outcome of the organism–environment transactions, but feed back into the environment itself, and thus are part of a recursive process that generates actors as fully-fledged subjects. Moreover, because action is a process, it has a history and a boundary (Rescher, Reference Rescher1996); it has physical, temporal, and conceptual edges that give it presence in space and time. A range of broadly relational social theories already speak to this in various ways, from the capillary operations of power/knowledge discussed by Foucault (Reference Foucault and Gordon1980), to the practice-oriented synthetic social theory of Giddens (Reference Giddens1979, Reference Giddens1984; in IR, see Steele, Reference Steele2008), to the Marxian-inspired agent-structure co-determinism of critical realism (Archer, Reference Archer1995; Bhaskar, Reference Bhaskar1998; in IR see Wendt, Reference Wendt1987; Wight, Reference Wight2006). Yet not all such approaches are equally sympathetic to a pragmatist analysis of normativity. Indeed, all three of those listed examples offer comparatively limited space for the situated and reflexive creativity key to understanding normative transformation.
However, other views of normativity can extend pragmatist theorizing beyond the immediacy of action. They approach the world as neither a cohesive whole nor an epiphenomenon of individual agents, but a structured configuration of transactions, generating both the action environment and the social material constituting actors as subjects imbued with dispositions and capacities. The four wagers draw from the agreements, strengths, and weaknesses of the more prominent of these approaches.
Wittgenstein's notion of the ‘language game’ envisions a practical, ongoing series of communicative interactions governed by rules but underdetermined by them (Wittgenstein, Reference Wittgenstein1958). Language games are bundles of practices and habits, and their form generates both the player and the ‘rules of the game’ alike. Yet because rules must be interpreted, there is always room for creative revision, and thus language games feature continual, dynamic transformations of the conventions that define them and the actors that play them. This suggests a view of social settings as plastic, horizontally distributed interchanges of rule-following performances, in which action is normatively oriented but retains creative and interpretive features (Winch, Reference Winch1958; see also Schatzki, Reference Schatzki1996). Goffman's work on communicative interaction, while not based on a reading of Wittgenstein, is nevertheless an excellent example of the sociological implications of thinking in terms of something language games.
Reading Wittgenstein as a theorist of normativity offers a key lesson: action is lively and the rules or institutions that form out of it are never ‘out of play’. The more robust they seem to be, the more interaction must be oriented around their maintenance. But while Wittgenstein alludes to a defined and historically embedded normative setting arising out of action, he misses the institutional and causal dimensions of normativity. The fluidity and multiplicity of language games, and the prioritization of hermeneutic explanations for changes in behavior, leave little room for theorizing politics as a genuine struggle in a world of competition and constraint, and thus a Wittgenstein's approach is sociologically limited.
Another helpful view comes from Bourdieu – not just in his capacity as a theorist of action, but as a theorist of social order. Bourdieu has enjoyed a recent renaissance amongst IR scholars, for whom he has offered a potent means of theorizing the habitual, embodied, and localized communities of practice that constitute key international institutions (Pouliot, Reference Pouliot2010; Bigo, Reference Bigo2011), the dispositional metaphysics of power (Guzzini, Reference Guzzini2013), and much of the foundation for the ‘practice turn’ that has more generally taken shape in the field (Adler and Pouliot, Reference Adler and Pouliot2011; Bueger and Gadinger, Reference Bueger and Gadinger2015). His concept of the ‘field’, by which he means a social space made up of asymmetrical relations of power and exchange, envisions an objective domain in which the artifacts of culture are produced and in which actor positions of advantage are captured, defended, secured, contended, and expanded (Bourdieu, Reference Bourdieu1984). Since Bourdieu put ‘fields’ to use in a range of now-famous analyses of a wide range of spheres of institutional and cultural life, other sociologists have developed the concept further. In a major recent book, A Theory of Fields, Fligstein and McAdam offer the following concise definition of the concept: a ‘mesolevel social order in which actors…interact with one another on the basis of shared (which is not to say consensual) understandings about the purposes of the field, relationships to others in the field (including who has power and why), and the rules governing legitimate action in the field’ (Fligstein and McAdam, Reference Fligstein and Mcadam2012, 1).
This definition suggests what ‘fields’ bring to a consideration of normativity, and also what limits their use for analyzing normative transformation. Like the concept of the language game, ‘fields’ describe a structured normative context for action: as an ordered terrain of social life comprising opposing institutional and economic positions, it accounts for the constitution of actors and action possibilities. Actors' manoeuvers and stratagems establish new cultural materials and new pathways for future such actions, enabling the normativity of action to work as a transformational force. However, the concept has two salient limits. First, because ‘fields’ are constitutively arranged around struggles for domination and supremacy, they feature a thin notion of normativity seemingly based on a quasi-instrumental view of action. Actions appear cynical, and lack the aspirational creativity that drives normative transformation on the pragmatist view. Second, transformations in fields are temporally detached from transformations of actors themselves; while a changing field should feature changing subjects, the two processes do not need to occur with any immediate reciprocity – and indeed, a key argument Bourdieu advances in a number of cases is that actors may possess a form of subjectivity ill-suited to life in their field (Bourdieu, Reference Bourdieu1984; Steinmetz, Reference Steinmetz and Gorski2013). Hence, while the concept of ‘field’ offers clues as to how to conceive of the cultural and institutional dimensions of normativity in action, it is not adequate for analyzing normative transformation – at least not without significant revision.
Norbert Elias offers final insights. He shows how changes in personal psychological make-up; subjectivity recursively supports and is supported by broader institutional arrangements in society (Elias, Reference Elias1994). At the core of this is his concept of a ‘figuration’: an interwoven complex of individuals living within a form of life, ‘characterized by socially and historically specific forms of habitus, or personality-structure’ (van Krieken, Reference Van Krieken1998, 52–53). Stable figurations not only condition actor identities, but also sustain the action environment, making politics possible in the first place: ‘At the core of changing figurations – indeed the very hub of the figuration process – is a fluctuating, tensile equilibrium, a balance of power moving to and fro, inclining first to one side and then to the other’ (Elias, Reference Elias1978, 131). Social arrangements also play a dual ontological role, as both sources of subjectivity, as packages of values and dispositions, and as structured environments of resources and constraints. In IR, Linklater (Reference Linklater2011) has made us of Elias's approach in a major study of the history of the cosmopolitan harm principle, and it is not hard to see how similar studies might be produced of other normative features of international politics that range individual emotions to major institutions – such as national identity and protections for children in cases of trafficking or conflict.
There are two lessons in Elias's approach that inform the conception of normativity I advance. First, that are both continually transforming and entangled within a similarly transforming array of broader institutional and cultural relations. Second, that both subjects and their words exhibit transactional dynamicity even though they are beholden to without power and domination in history. Its weakness, however, is an under-specified relationship between action and the constitution of these subjects and worlds. In other words, and unlike with Wittgenstein and Bourdieu, it is hard to connect Elias's approach to the way normativity empowers practice. Yet by reading Elias in concert with them, the synthetic understanding I propose should appear sound, and it should be apparent how it fits within the broader agenda of both action theorists and those studying the causes and effects of ‘norms’.
Analyzing normative transformations in three stages
In order to identify how a particular normative transformation of interest took place, I propose a three-stage analytical process: de-reification, attribution of agency, and tracing transactions. Many elements of this are already present in the discipline, in mapping out where norms sit within a set of institutions, identifying opportunity structures and agents or ‘entrepreneurs’ of norm change, and tracing how they go about mobilizing. Indeed, I retain these elements by design, both because that makes it easier for norm researchers to adopt and also because those researchers have in many ways implicitly grasped the need to de-reify their objects of study, even if their ontological vocabulary does not fully allow for this. The novelty here is a systematic approach for organizing analytical procedures around representing heterogeneous, interwoven practices, in arrangements of sympathy and tension, rather than summarizing them as singular objects, and showing how these arrangements fluctuate. This distills the insights of relational and pragmatist theory into a better-specified methodological framework for case analysis.
In de-reification, the researcher disaggregates the ‘norm-like’, defined by historical place as well as regulatory function, into its components. This stage recognizes that what motivates an investigation of normativity is often the apparent presence of what scholars have previously called ‘a norm’: some clear social agreement on a rule, value, principle, or institution, as something stable enough and coherent enough to influence the conduct of actors and be noticed by scholars. Yet instead of identifying this point or process of consensus as a ‘norm’, scholars instead represent it as a normative configuration – as the institutions, actors, means, formal and informal regulations, and practices generating stability in normativity over time. Notably, this should yield more than just an assortment of discourses; it should mean indexing a form of life. This also identifies points of tension, where problems of implementation or disagreement may spark innovation and transformation, along with the media through which sources influence and interact with the broader relational field in which they are situated.
De-reification shares much in common with the mapping of fields of structural and semiotic relations (Bourdieu, Reference Bourdieu1993; Pouliot, Reference Pouliot2007; Epstein, Reference Epstein and Adler-Nissan2013), along with the identification of actors and specialized structures of institutional governance (Fligstein and McAdam, Reference Fligstein and Mcadam2012). Examples of skillful normative de-reification by IR scholars include enquiries into cosmopolitan views on harm (Linklater, Reference Linklater2011), the foundations of human rights in Israel (Krebs and Jackson, Reference Krebs and Jackson2007), and the challenges presented by war crime allegations to Turkish and Japanese identity (Zarakol, Reference Zarakol2010) – all marked by an attention to process and to relational analyses. Simply put, this stage means identifying the who, what, when, and where of a given case of normative transformation.
The second stage, attribution of agency, draws from the pragmatist and relational view that agency emerges out of transactions between organisms and their environments (Emirbayer and Mische, Reference Emirbayer and Mische1998; see also Latour, Reference Latour2005). The premise here differs from the approach taken in most research on norms of treating agency as something actors have, and instead looks for agency in situations with a propensity for change. This is a necessary move when the objects of investigation comprise a distributed arrangement of actors all capable of revising their actions, but not all afflicted with the will to do so, even if opportunities could be found or made. Moreover, it recognizes that agency is not just actors altering situations, but also altering themselves, and thus cannot be assigned to any one kind of thing (like an ‘entrepreneur’ or an organization).
Attribution of agency involves locating and specifying transactions most likely to drive a normative transformation of interest. The scholar must look at a normative configuration and mark out points of contestation, technological innovation, or organizational openness – the places where processes of normative transformation are most likely to emerge. On a pragmatist and relational view, attribution of agency is also ‘agency detection’ – a systematic establishing of who and what was instrumental in driving certain changes. Moreover, it is testable, and if it is incorrect, it will not be possible to complete the third stage of the analysis. This provides methodological room to consider a range of competing explanations, and to examine whether they specify causal processes that can plausibly explain the observed normative transformation.
Several traditions of institutional analysis all feature agency attribution, albeit not per the pragmatist approach. Historical institutionalists examine exogenous shocks as destabilizing influences, identifying situations of crisis and actors with ambitions for change, the combination of which establishes the conditions for transformation (Thelen and Steinmo, Reference Thelen, Steinmo, Steinmo, Thelen and Longsreth1992; Steinmo, Reference Steinmo, Della Porta and Keating2008). IR scholars studying the rise of new prohibitionary regimes in the wake of the Cold War (Nadelmann, Reference Nadelmann1990), for example, relate major upheavals to new space for normative change. Complexity theorists study non-linear forms of interaction and thresholds at which small changes in particular interactions can lead to large changes across an entire system (Mitchell, Reference Mitchell2009), generating interesting transformations (Jervis, Reference Jervis1997; Byrne, Reference Byrne1998), such as in warfare (Bousquet, Reference Bousquet2008) or global climate governance (Hoffmann, Reference Hoffmann2011). Finally, practice theorists do not just map fields but also identify kinds of practices or types of practitioners with unusual transformative potential (Schatzki et al., Reference Schatzki, Cetina and von Savingy2001; Adler and Pouliot, Reference Adler and Pouliot2011), through indicators of rising pressure, friction, or institutional weakness. Though a pragmatist approach will focus specifically on sources of situated creativity, attributing agency is an established methodological technique, able to fit within a range of analytical frameworks.Footnote 10
The third stage, tracing transactions, is a form of ‘process tracing’: ‘the analysis of evidence on processes, sequences, and conjunctures of events within a case for the purposes of either developing or testing hypotheses about causal mechanisms that might causally explain the case’ (Bennett and Checkel, Reference Bennett, Checkel, Bennett and Checkel2015, 7). What distinguishes it from investigating how specific actors contest, interpret, or propagate ‘norms’ it is the focus on reciprocal re-constitution; that is, searching within the strings of transactions for the ways actors transform, with each iteration leaving the situation and everyone involved a little different than before. It emphasizes the embeddedness of actors within their own dilemmas, such that both are transformed through situated action. For the study of normative transformation, this offers one important benefit: it reveals how existing prohibitions can be ‘side-stepped’ not by changing what is prohibited but by transitioning out of given institutional category of regulated actor, with the ultimate effect being a new relationship between a rule and the conduct of those supposedly bound by it.
Normative transformation, practices, and relations
The theory of normative transformation I offer here is explicitly built around practice and relationality – both subjects of recent ‘turns’ in the discipline. I argue that it is better suited to practice or relation-centric approaches than are mainstream theories of ‘norms’, because it is ontologically consistent with their premises. Yet there already exists research in the practice and relational turns focusing on normative change without making use of the conceptual vocabulary of norms scholarship. Mainly this tackles large-scale historical transformation featuring changes not only in which conventions, rules, principles, and values are extant but also in how they are woven together in practice. In other words, there are periods of meta-normative transformation too lengthy or multidimensional to be easily narrowed down to contestation or entrepreneurship over specific ‘norms’. The gradual emergence and elaboration of a cosmopolitan notion of harm, and of harm reduction as a moral principle, is one such example (Linklater, Reference Linklater2011). Another is the emergence and management of self-other relations between China and the nomadic communities of the Inner Asian steppe, producing normative categories and their maintenance in practice (Mackay, Reference MacKay2016). A third is the emergence of a relatively stable set of identities and relations across religious divides (and their associated territories and institutions) in Europe, which occurred through intense social movement contestation (Nexon, Reference Nexon2009). All trace the causes and effects of particular constellations of principles, rules, authorities, and values – the stuff of ‘norms’ – but avoid foregrounding norms in their analytical apparatuses.
Moreover, practice-turn-associated scholars have also recently set forth configurational approaches able to perform some of the same analytical work as the approach I propose here. Vincent Pouliot recently combined Bourdieu's field theory and Goffman's theory of the interaction frame in a study of diplomatic ‘pecking orders’ (2016). Emanuel Adler's forthcoming book (2019) sets forth a theory of ‘cognitive evolution’ mobilizing process ontology to explain transformations in epistemic communities of practice. These two examples suggest that my own proposal is in good company, but also is consistent with a broader trend.
Yet a theory of normative transformation in particular adds value to the practice and relational turns in a number of ways, all generally a result of reapproaching the ends and interests of the norms research program in new ontological terms. First and foremost, it conserves one of the most significant achievements of constructivist IR to date: the reified view of norms itself enabled the de-reification of other key institutions and assumptions taken for granted by neorealist and neoliberal IR scholars, as part of the constructivist critique (McCourt, Reference McCourt2016). This is not an irony; it is an illustration of the explanatory virtues of gathering together and concretizing dispersed processes and relations, in cases where doing so makes tractable clear transformations in the objects of our investigation. While treating norms as real objects with essential features is a fallacy of misplaced concreteness, establishing their conceptual relevance, whether through reification or analytical ‘arrestation’, made it possible to explore the mutability of international relations, against the dogmas of anarchy and its implications.
Second, it mobilizes one of the best methodological contributions of the practice and relational turns: ethnographically sensitive ‘practice mapping’ (Pouliot, Reference Pouliot, Bennett and Checkel2015) to identify normativity even when there are no easily identifiable ‘norms’. Here the de-reification phrase of the proposed analytical process is especially valuable. Investigations into semi-secret institutions, such government security agencies or corporations concerned about proprietary industrial practices, or into culturally alien social spaces (either domestic or foreign) are most likely to present initial difficulties to researchers looking for ‘norms’, but by instead looking for normative configurations, it becomes easier to develop and ontologically coherent picture of regulation and valuation. It allows for the investigation of normativity without needing to know of, or refer to, some correlate ‘norm’, sidestepping data gaps, and possible debates on whether a norm exists rather than on whether something normative exists. Put differently, the theory of normative transformation I advance here is ontologically consistent with the practice turn but offers a set of concepts and commitments more sensitive to making sense of normativity than those currently available in practice theories of international relations. It maintains normativity as something specific, with its own language of ethics, imperatives, and value, even if studying normativity may involve the tracing of changes in practices and communities thereof.Footnote 11
Finally, it expands the vocabulary available to scholars in these to turns for studying more delimited episodes of institutional or practice transformation where there is clearly some significant regulatory or evaluative change, occurring rapidly yet not oriented around something they want to call a ‘norm’, both for ontological reasons and perhaps because actors themselves do not seem to conceive of it in that way. There are cases where part of the normative transformation taking place is not in what standards, values, or principles should apply to a situation, but in what counts as conforming to them. The cases of targeted killing, torture, and armed contractors, already discussed in the introduction, are examples of these. Contestation over definitions was part of what happened, but processes of practitioner-driven problem-solving, organizational change, and technical innovation feature in them as well, in ways that extend beyond discourse. They show changed understandings of what counts as a competent performance, as interests practice theorists (Adler and Pouliot, Reference Adler and Pouliot2011), but in ways that require an analytical language specifically designed to explore the dimensions of rightness, propriety, and value in action – in other words, in ways that require us to talk of normativity as such, without reifying it into social objects or dissolving it into a more general theory of practice.
Conclusion
The pragmatist and relational theory of normative transformation I propose here offers both analytical and meta-theoretical benefits. It makes it easier to study rapid institutional change, and offers an expanded vocabulary to those in the practice and relational turn for making sense of normativity while remaining loyal to the basic premises of their approaches. This should advance the overall constructivist project in the field, in ways that sustain and continue a long-standing interest in norms and normativity, but speak to emerging disciplinary shifts in social ontology and methodology.
In the discipline of IR, constructivism has largely been a critical response to reification (McCourt, Reference McCourt2016), and the turns toward practices and relations sustain that critique even as older constructivist work itself becomes a critical target. While the bulk of practice/relational turn scholars and norms scholars alike have been focused on issues of diplomacy and security, the approach to theorizing normativity I propose here may help broaden the horizons of both research communities. One particular way is by equipping both with new tools for studying climate governance and other initiatives to grapple with the implications of climate change (Hoffmann, Reference Hoffmann2011), which involve the revision of a host of identities, values, and institutions, and knit together a range of interests and actors to confront an unprecedented global threat.
Another way my proposed approach may contribute empirical value, as noted in the introduction, is to help scholars respond to the rapid, multifaceted transformations occurring, or threatening to occur, in previously stable liberal-democratic institutions, ranging from the domestic to the international. Often not expressly oriented around norm entrepreneurship but nevertheless entailing significant normative change, political parties and campaigns across ‘the West’ employ a host of methods and discourses designed to revise dominant practices and interpretations of human rights, sovereignty, national identity, and citizenship. Appreciating how these insurgents act, and responding to the threats they pose (for those who find them threatening), is aided by the intellectual tools supplied by the philosophical and sociological approaches I draw upon here, and the de-reified conception of normativity and change they disclose. In other words, this essay does not merely respond to a disciplinary puzzle, but also a pressing political problem.
Author ORCIDs
Simon Frankel Pratt, 0000-0001-6749-3442
Acknowledgments
I acknowledge the invaluable mentorship and advice of Emanuel Adler on this project, along with Matthew Hoffmann, Robert Brym, Steven Bernstein, and Christian Bueger.
