Unlocking the agency of the governed: contestation and norm dynamics

Abstract

International Relations (IR) research on the translation and appropriation of international norms emphasises both the role of local agency and the fundamental malleability of norms. However, these perspectives cannot unlock the full agency of the governed as they limit agents’ effects on norms to incremental changes at the margins. We suggest transcending the distinction between the local and the global by taking practices of contestation as constitutive for normative agency. In such a perspective, we can differentiate types of contestatory practices and analyse how they affect norms.