The contentious politics of norms in international society

Over the past century, there have been some dramatic changes in the relations between women and the state. Women are no longer excluded from state institutions such as voting, most states have created a national agency to handle women’s issues, and a large and increasing number of states are taking active steps to boost the levels of women in national legislatures. States are clearly not static beings – they embody dynamic processes with changing sets of aims and institutional forms. In pointing to changes in the relations between women and the state, this book, like many others, has attempted to show empirically that states are indeed ongoing projects that must be understood in a social context. States become engaged with and disengaged from various social forces that vary in spatial and temporal scope, some being more local and/or more shifting than others. My concern has been with the embeddedness and positioning of states within the context of international society.

What does it mean to contend that states are embedded in international society? This book uses a rather minimal conception of international society, approaching the international as a society primarily in the sense of being social: constituted by meaningful practices and inter-subjective knowledge. Like other international actors, states are discursively and relationally constituted, structured and regulated by a multiplicity of norms, values and causal claims. Claiming that states are in and of international society does not mean one has to picture that society as a socially integrated whole whose constituent parts fully share a common value system. This book has shown that state institutions such as women’s suffrage have indeed been interpreted very differently around the world, being validated for diverse reasons and made into distinctive kinds of practices. Clearly, there can be multiple scripts at work in the world.