This article explores norms as idealizations, in an attempt to grasp their significance as projects for international organizations. We can think about norms as ‘standards of proper behaviour’. In this sense they are somehow natural, things to be taken for granted, noticed only really when they are absent. We can also think about norms as ‘understandings about what is good and appropriate’. In this sense, norms embody a stronger sense of virtue and an ability to enable progress or improvement. Norms become ideal when they are able to conflate what is good with what is appropriate, standard, or proper. It is when the good becomes ‘natural’ that a norm appears immanent and non-contestable, and so acquires an idealized form.45 Along with the other articles in this special issue, I will attempt to challenge some of the complacency surrounding the apparent naturalness and universality of norms employed in international relations.

Constructivism has inherited a hermeneutic tension from the sociology of knowledge tradition regarding a strong ontological proposition that all social beings interpret their reality and a qualified epistemological proposition that some social beings are better able to interpret the reality of others. This article focuses on the politics of knowledge production that arise from this tension, namely that a privileged group, the ‘scholastic caste’, possesses the power to de-value the explanations of ‘lay’ groups’ experiences by deeming them to be insufficiently ‘scientific’. The article explores these politics by addressing the meaning of the abolition of and emancipation from Atlantic slavery, a case study popularly used in constructivist literature. Noting the absence of engagement by constructivists with the ‘lay’ interpretations of enslaved Africans and their descendants, the article explores a hermeneutical position developed by the Jamaican sociologist and novelist, Erna Brodber, which directly addresses these tensions.

The aim of this article is to provide a postcolonial reading of norms in international politics. Focusing specifically on the question of postcolonial agency, the article argues that the constructivist literature provides a distinctive spatial and temporal ordering of the ‘international’ that on the one hand can be seen to attribute agency to the postcolonial subject, while on the other can easily be interpreted as denying a presence for this subject. An alternative reading suggests that postcolonial agency is not only constituted by the international and its normative construction, but is also constituting, having the capacity to variously subvert and transform, but within limits. While some constructivist thinkers, primary among them being Christian Reus-Smit, recognise the normative order of the international as historically contested terrain, and where such contestation testifies to the role of the postcolonial world, how this role is articulated, and in what terms it is understood pose distinct challenges for understandings of agency and the constitution of the international. Focusing on Homi Bhabha and Franz Fanon, the article looks to how postcolonial thought can be mobilised to respond to this challenge, and to point to an alternative conception of the transformative potential of postcolonial agency. The turn to Bhabha and Fanon reveals such potential in both discursive and material terms so that where Bhabha can be said to frame agency and the terrain of the international in hybrid ideational terms, complementing Reus-Smit’s understanding of what can be termed the ‘postcolonial international’, Fanon’s more radical materialist ontology envisages agency in terms of embodied presence. This mobilisation of postcolonial thought provides the theoretical tools for conceptualising postcolonial subjectivity and articulations of agency in relation to the international and its constitution.