Paul Morrow is a moral and political philosopher with an interest in normative theory and political violence. In this book, he pursues three main goals. The first is to show that, despite common intuitions to the contrary, mass atrocities “typically reflect the presence, not absence of norms” (p. 3). He thus argues that norms are “crucial to both the explanation and prevention” (p. 9) of atrocities like genocide and ethnic cleansing. His second goal is to build off research by philosophers on the nature and dynamics of norms to provide social scientists with a more precise conceptual framework for studying the roles of norms in enabling and constraining mass atrocities. Finally, Morrow aims to show how these insights can inform policy efforts to prevent atrocities.
Morrow defines norms as “practical prescriptions, permissions, or prohibitions, accepted by individuals belonging to particular groups, organizations, or societies, and capable of guiding the actions of those individuals” (p. 19). He identifies three types—moral, legal, and social norms—and distinguishes them by two criteria: whether they are “grounded in real or perceived social practices” and are “subject to standing procedural rules governing their creation, modification, or elimination” (p. 12). Legal norms fulfill both criteria, social norms fulfill only the first, and moral norms fulfill neither. For each type, Morrow devotes one chapter to its role in the commission of atrocities and one chapter to its role in their prevention. To support his arguments across these six chapters, Morrow combines evidence from first-person contemporaneous accounts close to mass atrocities—for example, letters, diaries, and reports—with findings from studies by historians and social scientists. Morrow’s aim is not to present testable hypotheses but to provide concepts that can help scholars discern the constitutive work that norms are doing in the commission and prevention of atrocities.
For political scientists, the ubiquity of norms is not a new idea. For example, international relations (IR) constructivists have long argued that all political behavior is norm governed, and feminist scholars have long highlighted the ways that gender norms structure the commission of violence. But Morrow’s more important contribution comes from his teasing out how concepts that have been invoked by scholars—such as dehumanization, euphemization, and shaming—at root implicate the power of norms. Examining these processes through a norms lens helps us better understand how they come about and how they contribute not just to mass atrocities but also to widespread human rights violations more generally. For example, the use of euphemisms to obscure the character of particular policies or actions is an example of what Morrow calls “norm evasion”; that is, “when the scope of norms that individuals belonging to particular populations accepted is intentionally altered to legitimate some otherwise prohibited behavior” (p. 50). Applying a norms lens to this concept helps us see that popular participation in, or support for, human rights violations does not require the negation or replacement of preexisting moral norms, a common argument that Morrow refutes. Instead, such abuses are often facilitated by the alteration of existing moral norms in ways that redefine to whom and what the norm applies.
The difference has subtle but important implications for where scholars train their analytic lenses, because the work of instigators to get would-be perpetrators to replace their preexisting moral commitments with inverted ones is different from the work of persuading them to alter the scope of those commitments. From this perspective, we can better understand the work that the euphemism “enhanced interrogation techniques” performed in bolstering public support for torture in the War on Terror. Officially reclassifying waterboarding and sleep deprivation as something less than torture did not so much persuade Americans to give up their preexisting moral commitments against torture; instead, it encouraged them to reconsider the scope of that moral commitment by narrowing the range of conduct to which it applied.
Morrow’s conceptual scheme also carries interesting implications for the dynamics of norm change and diffusion. For example, because social norms are not governed by standing procedural rules but, unlike moral norms, are grounded in perceptions of actual practice, they can spread based on misperceptions about others’ beliefs. Likewise, given that social norms are dependent on perceptions of others’ beliefs, a lack of information about the beliefs of others may allow preexisting social norms to persist even in the face of deliberate, large-scale social transformation, an insight Morrow invokes to help explain the persistence of traditional gender roles under the Khmer Rouge.
Morrow’s other main contribution concerns how his insights about norms can inform efforts to prevent atrocities. His aim is not to offer detailed policy prescriptions as much as illuminate how the particular features of moral, legal, and social norms underpin their abilities to constrain violence. For example, Morrow argues that social norms prescribing silence about atrocities, such as wartime sexual violence, help perpetuate such abuses by giving perpetrators cover and hindering understandings of their causes. Because social norms are dependent on perceptions of social congruence for their existence, actions that undermine perceptions about the stigma of public discussion can help discourage future atrocities.
Again applied to the example of torture in the War on Terror, Morrow’s arguments highlight what is at stake in the lack of accountability. When President Obama said that he would rather “look forward and not backwards,” he reinforced a social norm that says US presidential administrations should not hold previous ones accountable for human rights violations. From Morrow’s perspective, this norm is permissive of future abuse. But if a wide array of official and non-official actors undermine this norm by, say, naming names and bringing lawsuits, then future would-be torturers and their sponsors should be more likely to be deterred from such conduct in the future.
On the whole, Morrow does a great service in illuminating the norm-governed dimensions of atrocities and their prevention. But the specific ways that his insights fit into ongoing theoretical debates or disciplinary research agendas are less clear. Morrow’s stated aim is to provide social scientists with a conceptual framework for studying the role of norms in atrocities. But the disciplines in which such scholars work, like political science, sociology, and law, already have long, rich traditions of theorizing norms and their dynamics. Morrow does not make a case for the superiority of his approach over these existing frameworks, but instead singles out a few interlocutors for each chapter who act as foils for his points. Individual readers will thus be left to wonder how Morrow’s approach represents an improvement over decades of progress on studying norms and violence in their own disciplines.
This lack of deep engagement with the state of the art in particular disciplines undermines Morrow’s goal of offering social scientists an improved conceptual framework compared to their existing ones. For example, Morrow argues that his normative approach to explaining atrocities “surpasses” approaches that appeal to the instrumental rationality of political leaders (p. 9). But political scientists have long shifted away from zero-sum thinking between normative and strategic explanations, and the most interesting work today explores how these logics interact. Morrow does briefly touch on these relationships at times, such as his point on how challenges to norms prescribing silence can deter future perpetrators. But I think Morrow’s framework would find greater purchase among social scientists if these relationships received more systematic treatment. Morrow also leaves unaddressed other issues that are of interest to social scientists and that would be relevant to his arguments, such as the specific mechanisms connecting norms to behavior, the role of legitimacy in normative power, and the role of contestation in changing norms. Ultimately, these omissions weaken his claim to be presenting what he calls a “general theory” of the influence of norms in mass atrocities (p. 1).
Overall, Morrow valuably catalogs and synthesizes insights from across the social sciences and philosophy to bring our attention to various ways that norms operate before, during, and after atrocities. His clear and parsimonious definitions of different kinds of norms and normative processes will be useful for scholars, and they can be applied beyond mass atrocities to the dynamics of human rights violations more generally. They also highlight the value of analytic philosophy for clarifying social science concepts and arguments. Morrow’s prose is lucid, concise, and highly readable, admirably eschewing unnecessary jargon and ensuring the book’s accessibility to a broad interdisciplinary and even non-academic audience. Although policy makers may struggle to apply some of his insights about atrocity prevention to specific policy proposals, they nonetheless provide novel avenues for creative thinking about how cultivating new norms or subverting existing ones may lower the likelihood of mass violence.
