The concluding chapter identifies three broad contributions of the book: explaining the choices made by states about language; offering explicit historical institutionalist accounts of the politics of language by centering the analysis on the state and using notions of legacies, critical juncture, path dependency, layering, conversion, and drift, among others; and, the further development, leveraging, and testing of the concept of state traditions as a theoretical and analytical focus for explaining language policy. The chapter also synthesizes the important points coming out of the case studies drawn from a multiplicity of contexts, namely that processes of state-making and state-building are central in forging the state traditions that steer linguistic policies towards specific developmental paths; that the specific nature and configuration of political institutions within a state, not only at founding but also as it evolves over time when adjusting to changing societal dynamics and circumstances, heavily condition the choices states make about language; and that political ideas and norms are central to state traditions since they tend to structure both political and policy development by conditioning the choices of political actors, pushing societies into specific paths of linguistic choices at the expense of others.

Cybersecurity has emerged as a paramount concern in today’s digital age, especially when considering the vast range of digital assets now in circulation, among which non-fungible tokens (NFTs) hold significant prominence. This chapter delves deeply into the intricate landscape of cybersecurity as it pertains to NFTs. By meticulously analyzing the multifaceted technical challenges and potential vulnerabilities inherent to NFTs from a cybersecurity perspective, this chapter seeks to provide an overview of the landscape as of this writing. Furthermore, this chapter explores how existing laws, policies, and societal norms have addressed these issues thus far, and speculates on how they might evolve in the future to more effectively bridge the governance gaps and safeguard these unique digital assets.

Chapter Two summarizes the compliance literature on international relations and international law, addressing both theoretical and empirical work. This literature can be divided into two groups: The first group explores why states comply with international law and is generally associated with the primary schools of international relations theory. The study may confirm or illustrate the applicability of aspects of one or more of these theories, although that is not necessary for it to be valuable in illuminating the motivations that affect policymakers and states. The second group within the compliance literature examines more closely how states comply at the domestic level and focuses on domestic policymaking within the United States government. In this regard, the chapter concentrates on two similar normative and process-oriented approaches. The first, the international legal process approach, is drawn from international legal scholarship; the second is primarily drawn from constructivist international relations theory, and was developed primarily by Wayne Sandholtz and Christopher Whytock, among others. Both approaches emphasize the role of internalized norms and the importance of process and organizational structure in decision-making. They are, accordingly, helpful in understanding the effect of legal norms, lawyers, and process in State Department decision-making.

In 2015, UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty Philip Alston stated that the World Bank treats “human rights more like an infectious disease than universal values and obligations” because of its understanding of what constitutes political interference. The World Bank’s interpretation, replicated by the Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) in the development finance regime complex, has shaped how activists hold the Banks to account. This chapter examines how the international accountability norm emerged through contestation with the World Bank and spread to be taken as given for the MDBs, as distinct from international human rights and environmental elemental regimes. It then documents how activists seek to protect human and environmental rights through the banks’ international accountability mechanisms as quasi-legal processes with implications for the banks’ culpability. Although there is an increasing recognition of some rights such as free, prior and informed consent and labour, the banks continue to view these as internal standards not legal obligations. The chapter then examines the extent to which the norm needs to be backed by hard law to be enforced, with efforts by the banks to maintain their international organisation immunity given legal claims as to their implication in human and environmental rights abuses.

My aim in this chapter is to contribute to what the volume calls the ‘third move’ in International Relations norm studies, which explicitly addresses the legitimacy of the norm being studied as well as its influence on practice. I build on the work of those who point to the relevance of classical American Pragmatism, which considers how we know that what we are doing is appropriate once we realise that norms are the product of social and historical practices rather than abstract moral foundations. I trace the Pragmatist’s commitment to deliberative inquiry through the ideas of Charles Peirce and John Dewey and relate it to Antje Wiener’s arguments that normativity is sustained through proactive contestation. While there are overlaps between the two approaches, I argue that Deweyan Pragmatism can help us understand when it is appropriate to defend a norm against contestation. It does this by drawing on what Dewey called a ‘stock of learning’, understood as the background knowledge that has epistemic authority because it is the product of a deliberative and inclusive process of inquiry. I develop this with reference to debates within Pragmatist philosophy before applying it to offer a preliminary assessment of global health norms.

This chapter introduces the concept of regulatory contestation as a lens for analysing the development of transnational normative orders. It critiques mainstream conceptualisations of regulation in International Relations (IR) and international law as unnecessarily narrow and advances a broader definition of regulatory governance as actions that steer the flow of events towards specified regulatory goals. This definition allows for the analysis of the creative and generative function of regulation and shows that the process of regulatory contestation facilitates the mediation of international norms into varied social and political contexts. Studying regulatory contestation provides insight into the power dynamics that are shaping fundamental institutions of international order at a micro-level. The chapter illustrates this process through a case study of the accountability turn in the implementation of human protection norms. The recent proliferation of juridical and institutional mechanisms to prevent, protect and prosecute mass violations of human rights is indicative of an emergent transnational human protection order. It applies the lens of regulatory contestation to these global efforts. It concludes by considering the value of regulatory contestation as an analytical lens in IR, contributing to an understanding of constitutive processes that build transnational normative orders.

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.

This chapter introduces the three foundational questions of IP: what are intellectual things (the metaphysical question)? Is intellectual property really property (the conceptual question)? And should intellectual things be property (the normative question)? It highlights the role of argument and reason in contemporary IP law.

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.