Reification as an ontological problem

Reification has been a feature of the norms research program since its inception. By reification, I mean scholars orient their analyses around specific norms as if they were objective ‘things’ (Berger and Luckmann Reference Berger and Luckmann1991, 89). The first wave of norms research, between 1990s and early 2000s, developed the concept of norms – ‘standards of approach behavior for actors’ – to explain how ideas shaped international politics (Finnemore and Sikkink Reference Finnemore and Sikkink1998). Research in this wave depicted norms as being relatively uncontested, with stable definitions: for example, in order to show that aversion to nuclear weapons restrained the use of nuclear force, Tannenwald (Reference Tannenwald1999) defines the nuclear taboo as a coherent idea that is separate and discrete from rationalist and materialist factors such as threat perception and military power. Beginning in the early 2000s, a second wave of norms research focused on how actors contest, interpret, and redefine specific norms (e.g. Wiener Reference Wiener2009). These scholars, in contrast to the first wave, depicted norms as ambiguous in meaning, with unstable definitions: Hurd (Reference Hurd2007, 210) argues that the 2003 intervention in Iraq legitimized a new understanding of preemption. Recently, a third wave of research has focused on norm strength, with a particular interest in the causes of noncompliance and norm decay (Adler-Nissen Reference Adler-Nissen2014; Evers Reference Evers2017). Work in this wave is again oriented around specific norms, such as those related to torture (D'Ambruoso Reference D'Ambruoso2015), and targeted killing (Banka and Quinn Reference Banka and Quinn2018).

And yet, many scholars find reification to be a problem. Critical and post-colonial theorists criticize reification for ethical reasons. Accordingly, when scholars treat norms as exogenously given, they assume a false objectivity that conceals the power struggles inherent to meaning-making, and silences alternative – particularly non-Western – worldviews (e.g. Kaczmarska Reference Kaczmarska2019); treating the institution of marriage as fact, for example, obscures the gendered practices of marriage, and delegitimizes queer and polyamorous lifestyles. In addition, practice theorists claim reification to limit our understanding of change (e.g. McCourt Reference McCourt2016). Simon Pratt (Reference Pratt2019, 7, 19), most recently, argues that when scholars reify norms as objects, they treat norms as separate from social action, and diminish cases of practical innovation, ‘where 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.’ This makes it difficult, he argues, to distinguish between norm contestation and violation without making political judgments about a case. Pratt (Reference Pratt2019, 2) uses the example of RDI: proponents of enhanced interrogation techniques did not consider their actions to be transgressing the prohibition on torture, because from their perspective, ‘what they did was not torture at all.’ Thus, Pratt argues ‘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.’ Rather than reify social norms, Pratt suggests we focus on scrutinize actors' practices, investigating ‘what involved actors actually were contesting or seeking to transform.’

However, I believe both groups, not just Pratt, mistake reification as a problem, when in reality, it is a common practice in everyday life. As Berger and Luckman (Reference Berger and Luckmann1991, 89) explain, reification is foundational to the construction of social life: ‘as soon as an objective social world is established, the possibility of reification is never far away.’ Social agents often treat aspects of the world as if they were real, generating what Searle (Reference Searle1995, 2, 26) calls ‘social facts.’ These are aspects of the world that are treated as if they were real because all the relevant actors agree that they exist. Money is the classic example: certain pieces of paper count as money because we all believe they are money, not because they have some inherent value. Social facts have a taken for granted quality, and confront agents as objective facts that cannot be ignored, even though they are socially (Pouliot Reference Pouliot2004, 329). Certainly, social facts have concrete effects through practices: money feels real because we can exchange it for goods and services. But these practices gain their meaning through collective beliefs about reality, rather than an individual agent's particular beliefs or practices (Searle Reference Searle1995, 63).

Reification pervades international politics. Wendt (Reference Wendt1992, 399) explains that key institutions in international politics, like anarchy, sovereignty, or security dilemma, are rooted in shared ideas and norms ‘about how the world works.’ These institutions feel just as real as a nuclear bomb; as collective knowledge, they ‘come to confront individuals as more or less coercive social facts, but they are still a function of what actors collectively “know”.’ When norms are so widely accepted by states and people, they gain a taken-for-granted quality that makes it easy to forget their social origins and treat them as if they were real (Finnemore and Sikkink Reference Finnemore and Sikkink1998). Sovereignty, like money, exists only because there is a collective belief that it is valid, not because it is an inherent feature of the international system. Even states that are dysfunctional continue to exist, because other states recognize them as sovereign. If states stopped believing in these norms, then their identity as sovereigns would disappear (Chowdhury and Duvall Reference Chowdhury and Duvall2014). Reification is essential to how international structures such as the state system are maintained.

Consequently, shifts in collective knowledge drive norm change. Scholars often portray norm change as a cycle of de-reification, modification, and reification (Sandholtz and Stiles Reference Sandholtz and Kendall2009; Wiener Reference Wiener2009; Hofferberth and Weber Reference Hofferberth and Weber2015, 85). When there is break down or sudden challenge to the consensus, norms may become denaturalized and lose their ‘taken-for-granted’ quality (momentarily or permanently), leading actors to redefine the norm. Acts of noncompliance, such as challenging compliance criteria, refusing to apply norms on the ground, or proposing alternative interpretations of the norm, play a critical role in kickstarting this process. But, they do not act as an independent causal force. These acts only gain meaning as focal points for contestation: how people as a collective body negotiate acts of noncompliance determines whether norms change or not (Kratochwil and Ruggie Reference Kratochwil and Ruggie1986, 767). Price (Reference Price2019, 44) aptly captures this idea when he argued the importance of studying third-party reactions to norm violations: ‘just as one would not conclude that a norm against human sacrifice is no longer robust because of one sociopath's violation, it is key to assess overall robustness of an international norm with respect to how much any given violation spurs a trend toward more general weakening of the norm among the other members of that community.’ Consider the example of money: I could say that rocks not dollars are money, but the action will have little effect so long as people still go on believing that the dollar bill is money whereas my rock is just a rock. I have to convince others to believe that my rock is money and the dollar is not. Change occurs when there are shifts in everyday acts of reification.

These factors suggest that reification must be a necessary part of our understanding of international politics. First, it is necessary to understand the conditions under which emancipation is feasible. Agents view the economy, the division of labor, money, and capital as ‘real’ things in world politics, which may constrain some outcomes and enable others. If we ignore that norms appear real to people, then we deny the real impediments to social change, suggesting that all we need to do is re-describe our problems to make them go away – as if the real solution to torture is to stop calling it torture. Instead, we need to understand the prevailing structure to know what situation we are in, what actions will be punished, and the possibilities of social change within the present context (Wight Reference Wight2003, 717). Certainly, scholars should be explicit in their analyses that social norms are not, in fact, ‘real.’ But recognizing that certain norms exist and have constraining effects is necessary to encourage moral progress in world politics.

Moreover, tracing acts of reification provides an accurate depiction of how norms emerge and change in international politics. As Finnemore and Sikkink (Reference Finnemore and Sikkink1998, 892) explain, ‘because norms by definition have a quality of “oughtness” and shared moral assessment, norms prompt justifications for action and leave an extensive rail of communication among actors that we can study.’ This allows scholars to observe everyday acts of reification, investigating whether people as a collective body treat a particular idea or belief as if it were a real ‘objective fact,’ and tracing changes in collective knowledge (Onuf Reference Onuf1994, 6; Raymond Reference Raymond2019, 10). Pratt is wrong then that scholars cannot distinguish norm violations from norm contestation without stepping into the political fray. They can address this problem, as Wiener (Reference Wiener2009) describes, ‘by focusing on discourse as the “structure of meaning-in-use”’; for example, scholars can classify RDI as a case of norm contestation or based on how other people talk about the program and the prohibition against torture. Pratt's analysis is, in other words, solving a problem that doesn't exist. Treating reification as an analytical problem would diminish an essential part of how norms are maintained and changed in international politics.

Reification as an epistemological problem

Problem or not, reification cuts at another question in international relations: what drives social action in international politics? Practice theorists argue that most of what people do in world politics is not the result of rational or norm-following action, but rather routinized and tacit know-how. In their view, this tacit know-how precedes norms-based reasoning. To the extent that norms exist ‘as things,’ it is in and through social practices (Pouliot Reference Pouliot2010, 36–38). Pratt builds on this critique, proposing we replace the concept of norms with the normative configuration: ‘arrangements of ongoing, interacting practices establishing action-specific regulation, value-orientation, and avenues of contestation.’Footnote ¹ Pratt argues that normativity inheres within action. Actions help anchor social understandings and produce meaning in the world, declaring ‘this is how is’ or ‘these are the rules of the game.’ Moreover, action provides the possibility for recursive transformation. Agents can engage in creative problem-solving to resolve competing imperatives and values. However, Pratt claims that a single practice does not have normative features. Normativity develops when specific practices are grouped and arranged together ‘to generate a set of regulative outcomes.’

While I agree with Pratt that norms research and the practice turn can be united, I do not believe his framework offers a compelling solution. The reason is that practices, at least for Searle, are constrained by social facts. The two are certainly interrelated phenomena; social facts give practices meaning, and practices help instantiate social facts. A 20-dollar bill creates the possibility of paying for something, and the act of paying for something reinforces the value of the 20-dollar bill (Searle Reference Searle1995, 36, 57). There is no doubt that people are rarely conscious of this process when they interact; they exchange money for goods without actually considering what is money. The problem, for Searle, is how people can interact socially without being conscious of the social facts that constitute their practices. Many practice theorists would explain this through background knowledge – shared beliefs about how to perform a practice competently or incompetently – and be agnostic about where this knowledge originates from (i.e. Adler and Pouliot Reference Adler and Pouliot2011).Footnote ² Searle (Reference Searle1995, 146) goes one step further, adding a diachronic element: ‘often the person who behaves in a skillful way within an institution behaves as if he were following the rules, but not because he is following the rules unconsciously nor because his behavior is caused by an undifferentiated mechanism that happens to look as if it were rule structured but rather because the mechanism has evolved precisely so that it will be sensitive to the rules.’ Practices evolve in such a way that actors end up behaving ‘as if’ they were consciously following social facts, ‘without actually containing any beliefs or desires or representations of those rules’ (Searle Reference Searle1995, 141). In essence, practice is separate from but sensitive to social facts. Actors are free to develop new practices, but they run up against a social structure that may punish them for doing so.

The relationship between social facts and practice is central to the agency-structure debate in international politics. By that, I mean the reciprocal relationship between social agents and social structures: how social structures enable social agents, and how social agents reproduce and change those same social structures.Footnote ³ While scholars in this debate disagree over the relative causal weight assigned to agents or structures, they tend to agree that all social practices take place within a social structure that enable some actions and constrain others (e.g. Onuf Reference Onuf1989, 36, 49–51; Wendt Reference Wendt1992, 407; Klotz et al. Reference Klotz, Lynch, Checkel and Dunn2006; Wight Reference Wight2006, 114–15; Raymond Reference Raymond2019, 243). This structure consists of both material factors (e.g. weapons, buildings, and technology) and intersubjective beliefs (e.g. shared rules, norms, and language). Certainly, social structures are always reproduced and sustained through the social activities of agents, but as Wight (Reference Wight2006, 114–15) explains, this occurs under conditions inherited from the past: most agents experience structure as ‘already-established forms of organization […] that have been reproduced and/or transformed in the past and which confront new generations of individuals as objective structural contexts which reward certain forms of behavior and punish others.’ We often observe this through professional training, which socializes people to value certain things and engage in specific practices that fit within a given domain (Finnemore and Sikkink Reference Finnemore and Sikkink1998, 905). For example, diplomats inherit a normative context that makes diplomatic exchange between sovereign states possible by defining which self-interests count are appropriate in a negotiation setting, and the procedures for competitive bargaining (Müller Reference Müller2004, 425). Diplomats' training and social interactions teaches them to engage in a set of practices that makes it seem as-if they were following these diplomatic norms, even if they are not be consciously following these norms (Pouliot Reference Pouliot2016).

Because of this relationship, Pratt cannot explain how a normative configuration emerges without implicitly referencing a social norm. As Pratt (Reference Pratt2019, 12) explains, every practice is a necessary part of a normative configuration, but not every ‘arbitrary assortment of practices constitutes a normative arrangement.’ The defining feature, he claims, is that normative configurations have ‘regulative outcomes’ by ‘directing action toward the attainment of particular outcomes and by treating certain kinds of symbols and performances as authoritative’ (Pratt Reference Pratt2019, 12, 13). Yet, Pratt does not explain the logical structure of a normative configuration. What about its structure and organization creates these ‘regulative outcomes’? What distinguishes an assortment of practices like walking upright from engaging in torture?Footnote ⁴ It must be that one is defined by a collectively held norm and the other isn't. To some extent, Pratt admits this: he identifies a normative configuration by first disaggregating ‘what scholars have previously called “a norm”.’ Consequently, his framework for studying normative configuration becomes practically indistinguishable from how most scholars now study norms: examining how actors implement norms on the ground (de-reification in his framework); identifying political opportunity structures, crises, and tensions that trigger contestation (attributing agency in his framework); and tracing how actors discuss and reinterpret norms (tracing transactions in his framework) (e.g. Finnemore and Sikkink Reference Finnemore and Sikkink1998; Wiener Reference Wiener2009; Hofferberth and Weber Reference Hofferberth and Weber2015). Pratt (Reference Pratt2019, 16) insists this similarity is ‘by design’ (Pratt Reference Pratt2019, 16), but that is unsatisfactory. His analysis becomes oriented ‘around specific norms, both in theory and in practice,’ committing the very error he leveled against norms scholarship (Pratt Reference Pratt2019, 6). Essentially, normative configurations become another way of saying reified social norms, packaged in more complicated language.

Redefining normative configurations

Pratt wants to fundamentally change the way we study and talk about social norms. Yet I'm skeptical he will have that impact; the problem he identifies is not really a problem, and the solution he proposes is not really a solution. Reification is central to how norms emerge, change, and influence behavior in international politics. And the concept of normative configurations does not offer a clear enough alternative to reified social norms. Reification will, and I believe should, remain a central aspect of the study of international norms.

That said, I agree with Pratt that reifying social norms can create a bit of tunnel vision. Norms researchers have long recognized that norms are interrelated. Finnemore (Reference Finnemore2003, 57), for instance, stress the importance of viewing norms as part of ‘a fabric of interlocking and interwoven norms rather than to think of individual norms concerning a specific issue area.’ However, scholars have largely been silent on these interconnections, developing theories related to singular norms. While I believe it often makes sense to reify norms when focused on a single-issue area, Pratt (Reference Pratt2019, 18) correctly notes that ‘there periods of meta-normative transformation [that are] too lengthy or multidimensional to be easily narrowed down to contestation or entrepreneurship over specific “norms”.’ For example, the liberal international order has been undergoing simultaneous backlash to norms related to sovereignty, trade, democracy, and human rights. Surely these transformations are linked, but how? How do we conceptualize these links without diminishing everyday acts of reification?

The answer is that practices bind social facts together. Social facts, as Searle (Reference Searle1995, 35) explains, ‘cannot exist in isolation but only in a systematic relation to other facts.’ The reason is that social interaction is complex. Sometimes, these interconnections between social facts are logical. For example, in order for anybody to have something called money, the society must also have a system for exchanging goods and services for money, which requires a system of property and property ownership, and in turn, a system for enforcing property rights. Other times, these interconnections are due to people occupying multiple roles in society. A restaurant customer is at once a citizen, an owner of money, a client, and a bill payer, and is dealing with property, a restaurant, a waiter, and a bill. Searle describes this ‘interlocking’ of social facts as a complex network. Social facts (e.g. money, property, and debt) are the nodes in this network, and practices (e.g. owning, buying, selling, earning, and paying) are the social ties that link them together. The social fact of money, for instance, ‘marks one node a whole network of practices, the practices of owning, buying, selling, earning, pay off debts, etc.’ (Searle Reference Searle1995, 52).

Building on these insights, I suggest revising Pratt's definition of a normative configuration. A normative configuration refers to two or more norms that share a common practice or set of practices but come from distinct social domains.Footnote ⁵ This flips Pratt's understanding of practice as the foundation of international life. I treat norms as the foundational elements of international society and practices as the glue that binds them together.Footnote ⁶ Again, the interconnections between norms can be logical. For instance, in a society where states have territorial sovereignty, there must be a system for resolving disputes between states, which requires some conception of rights and responsibilities (Reus-Smit Reference Reus-Smit1997; Müller Reference Müller2004). They can also be due to the multidimensionality of social life, like how humanitarian intervention is bound up in norms related to humanitarianism, sovereignty, and human rights (Finnemore Reference Finnemore2003, 57).

The benefit of this conceptualization over Pratt's is that it allows us to study norms as reified social objects, without denying that practice plays a critical role in the construction of society. Scholars can continue to analyze norms involving a single-issue while recognizing that these norms are bound up in larger social structure. This means studying cycles of reification, contestation, and re-reification. Moreover, reconceiving normative configuration in this way can provide insight into those cases of multidimensional transformation. Scholars could examine diffusion effects within a normative configuration. Finnemore (Reference Finnemore2003, 57) explains that ‘changes in one set of norms may open possibilities for, or even logically or ethically require changes in, other norms.’ For example, reframing humanitarianism in terms of ‘protection’ shaped the practice of foreign intervention, leading to new notions of sovereignty, such as the ‘Responsibility to Protect.’ These diffusion effects would also explain why violations of individual norms are often perceived by audiences as threats to international society writ large (Adler-Nissen Reference Adler-Nissen2014). For example, using the category of ‘unlawful combatants’ to permit torture also provided justifications for violating related norms under international humanitarian law, such as the prohibition on extrajudicial detention. Contesting one norm opens the possibilities for contesting others.

Relatedly, scholars could study how normative configurations form and break apart. This includes processes of joining (or yoking), whereby two or more proto-boundaries are connected and then rationalized to be ‘inside’ the same entity. ‘Western civilization,’ as one example, comes from the joining together of European and American norms (Jackson Reference Jackson2006). Alternatively, scholars could study processes of breaking, whereby a claimed connection is dissolved, such that they become seen as separate entities.Footnote ⁷ This was on display when Israel assassinated Palestinian leader Khalil al-Wazir in 1988: Israel claimed assassination as a practice was within its right to self-defense as a sovereign state, bracketing the special nature of assassination from other means of killing, and thereby disconnecting sovereignty from the moral prohibition against torture (Großklaus Reference Großklaus2017).