The significance of emotions is often implicitly addressed in norm research. Some International Relations (IR) scholars, for example, suggest a regulatory function of emotions when it comes to norm-based behaviour, norm compliance, norm persuasion, and norm contestation. Yet, the literature on norms often takes these affective dynamics for granted without making them explicit. This contribution seeks to address this imbalance by examining the relationship between emotions (as moral value judgements) and norms (as collective expectations about appropriate behaviour). Specifically, we extend the current analytical focus by proposing a framework for the empirical investigation of emotional resonance in norm research. We argue that emotional resonance is crucial to the impact and enforcement of international norms because emotions assign specific value to norms within normative orders. We identify pathways and build bridges between norm research and research on emotions in IR and develop a theoretical model to show how emotional resonance is helpful for explaining failures of norm compliance. The way in which the absence of emotional resonance facilitates non-compliance is illustrated by the example of the Bush administration’s reaction to torture allegations in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

Over the past three decades norms research has become a subfield that matters beyond the boundaries of International Relations (IR). Like other such generative processes this subfield’s path is marked by debates over conceptual and methodological preferences. This book argues that irrespective of how we understand these divides, the critical question for today’s norms researchers is how have our understandings of norms developed over this period? To address this question this book brings together a range of junior, mid-career, and senior scholars, working at the leading edge of norm research, across a diversity of issues and subfields, and using different epistemological perspectives. Two lenses feature in this endeavour: the first considers the history of norm research as a series of three distinct and theoretical moves, and the second examines the potential of practices of interpretation and contestation (which we term the ‘interpretation-contestation framework’) as a way of bringing together a range of theoretical tools to understand norm change, evolution, and replacement. In short, this book focuses on the past trajectory of the field to argue that norm research continues to hold significant potential and promise for theorising within IR and studying current issues and problems.

The ILO was created in a period of globalization in the early nineteenth century to help governments agree on health and safety protections for workers. These labor standards were renewed after World War II and today the ILO is the primary global agency at the interface where governments and labor meet on a global scale. This chapter looks at the authority of the ILO in both theory and practice. The theory is provided by the legal texts of the ILO’s conventions and agreements, and a case study on Myanmar’s long-running violations of the rules provides insight into some of the lived experience of the rules.

International Relations theory has dealt extensively with norms and agency in normative environments, including the impact of norms on state behaviour; their diffusion and localisation; and their evolution, contestation, and change. Yet, to date the issue of norm conflict has remained theoretically and empirically understudied in International Relations. We still have little understanding of the judgements that governments or institutions make regarding compliance when the directives inherent in the norms to which they have committed appear to be mutually exclusive. The objective of this chapter is to conceptualise norm conflict as a challenge to decision-making in normative international environments and to outline a theoretical framework for studying and understanding norm conflict, including – most importantly – the ways in which states and international institutions seek to resolve it. In so doing, we draw from International Law and Sociology, two disciplines that have extensively dealt with norm conflict.

Over the past two decades, we have seen a significant shift in the norms literature away from the idea that a norm reflects a fixed and universally accepted shared understanding to notions that any norm – even those which appear to be widely institutionalised in international organisations of global governance – remains subject to contestation and interpretation at multiple sites in world politics. In this chapter, we take up the challenge of studying these diverse types of norms and their meaning, use, and role in practice. We begin by returning to the three moves laid out in the introduction and use as a vignette the forced landing of Ryanair Flight 4978 in Belarus in May 2021 to explore how each of these three moves can explain these events. We then draw out three sets of conclusions from the book, focusing on the process of contestation. We end by noting that the distinct approaches to norm research developed over the past thirty years do speak to one another in meaningful and innovative ways. By focusing on contestation in a holistic way, we can not only understand norms in a unique way but also how they constitute the world.

In international affairs, legal arguments and political actions shape each other. Unlike in domestic affairs, there is no enforcement authority, and hence there is much debate over how international law affects politics. Many existing approaches do not help us to assess what implementation efforts tell us about a state’s commitment to international law. Some study the effect of law on state behaviour but have a too static understanding of law and state preferences. Others focus on the justificatory discourse that accompanies norm implementation but do not assess individual states’ commitment to contested norms. This chapter studies what a state’s effort to implement a norm tells us about its sense of obligation towards that norm. I propose there are three signposts of obligation in the words and actions that accompany a state’s norm implementation: consistency, publicity, and engagement with the international community. I show that depending on whether the behaviour and discourse of a state displays a strong or weak sense of obligation, we can characterise a state’s norm implementation as exposing weak or strong normative influence or discursive or behavioral norm avoidance. I illustrate these different degrees with cases that involve a variety of different norms and states.

This chapter reassesses how norm studies around the three moves have advanced and limited our understanding of ambiguous and conflictive relations between norms. It focuses on a specific type of norm relation, a norm collision. Conflicting or incompatible social expectations regarding the appropriate behaviour of actors in a given situation characterise a norm collision. Adherence to one norm may then result in the breach of another. First, the chapter engages with the neglect or limited perspective of norm collisions in the three moves of norm research. Second, it illustrates how choosing a specific norm concept – as connected to each of the three ‘moves’ in norm research – matters for theorising and identifying norm collisions in and between dense and complex institutional frameworks and as a result of contestation. Third, it discusses how crises nurture norm collisions by destabilising agreed-upon norm balances. It uses the most recent transnational and domestic policy responses to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic as an example of how norms interact in practice and how a prioritisation of one norm may (negatively) affect another.

Systems approaches were an early part of the development of norms research as a subfield of International Relations but have been eclipsed by approaches which emphasise the role of actors, processes, and relationships. However, with new scholarship beginning to explore complex interactions of different norms and their relationship to the structure of the international system, the time to reassess existing systemic theories of international norms is now. This chapter traces the use of different types of systemic norms theory, including the norm life cycle, norms-as-structure, biological and ecological understandings of norm interaction and evolution, and complex systems theory (including regime complexes). By understanding international norms as emergent properties of a complex international system, we focus scholars’ attention on how the international system itself can affect the emergence, diffusion, contestation, and evolution of international norms and vice versa. The chapter finishes by employing a systems approach to understanding norm challenges regarding the rule of law.

The globalisation of advocacy and policy networks, including the dynamics of power that shape them, is integral to the emergence and evolution of norms. Yet the relationship between norms and networks remains undertheorised. How far and in what ways do changes in network structures affect the dynamism and diffusion of norms? Despite the cross-over empirically, and early scholarship on the role of advocacy networks in diffusing norms, the scholarship on international norms and that on transnational networks have subsequently developed on their own. This chapter explores the missing link between transnational networks and norm contestation by studying the spread and localisation of the ‘women, peace and security’ norm bundle. Networks do not merely serve to spread norms aka transmission belts. Rather, they are mechanisms of norm emergence, contestation, and transformation as well as diffusion. The transnational network spawned by UN Security Council resolution 1325 established a process to keep building the norm (bundle) and dialogue about it. Just as ‘norms’ are works in progress so too are the networks that support them. More attention needs to be focused on the changing nature of the agents and on the content of the evolving norms in discerning legitimacy or success of norms.

International organizations are established by international treaties that set out their powers and limits and the obligations toward international institutions even though few such institutions have the power to enforce their decisions. The politics of international organizations therefore arises in the dynamic between obligation, compliance, and enforcement.

Much of norm research that focuses on actors’ behaviour in relation to a norm refers either to behaviour in accordance with a norm (e.g., appropriateness or compliance) or to behaviour that constitutes critical engagement or even rejection with a norm (e.g., contestation or norm violation). What remains unchartered by these approaches is behaviour that not only is in accordance with a norm but also goes in some way beyond the expected behaviour. We suggest calling this ‘responsible behaviour’. Based on constructivist norms research and research on responsibility in world politics, we develop a conceptualisation that allows to better understand such behaviour. To substantiate our understanding of norm-related behaviour, we develop a typology of four ideal types: appropriate, responsible, inappropriate, and irresponsible behaviour. We then zoom into responsible behaviour and identify three configurations of responsible behaviour. First, over fulfilment of a norm by an actor; second, actors previously not addressed by the norm nevertheless decide to act accordingly to the norm; third, norm generative behaviour. Finally, we illustrate these three configurations with different examples from the realm of global politics, looking at diverse actors such as municipal governments and armed non-state actors, studying different norms and norm types in various situations.