Previous articleNext article FreeBroadening the Contestation of Norms in International RelationsBrent SteeleBrent SteeleUniversity of Utah Search for more articles by this author University of UtahPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreAntje Wiener’s A Theory of Contestation is an impressive achievement. Readers of this meticulous undertaking should not be fooled by its conciseness. While a seemingly brief book-length study, it is nevertheless a mighty work that treats the contestation of norms in a comprehensive, persuasive, and detailed fashion. It succeeds in pursuing its analytical, theoretical, normative, and empirical purposes. What follows is a presentation of the types of critiques that seem to be excluded from her analysis, but ones that the book (and its author) I think can speak to. These should not be read as critiques that expose some major flaw in the book, but rather as an invitation for further extension and discussion for how we might grapple with its argument in ways not initially captured by its scope.Wiener does a meticulous job in the book of discussing the importance of access to norm contestation along three dimensions: formal validation, social recognition, and cultural validation. In her words, “the key point, which A Theory of Contestation wishes to highlight, is that access to these three dimensions is not equally shared among all stakeholders.”1 Indeed, this point of her theory of contestation is carefully focused. Yet while she engages the critical constructivist focus on norms and their contestation, I do not see much critique of norms themselves in Wiener’s theory—norms being problematized because of the norms’ exclusionary features when they are formed (within particularly communities), but universally applied thereafter.Let me provide two sets of examples regarding strident forms of contestation—resistance and even rebellion—of and against norms. Wiener situates her theory and approach within key, prosaic, and high-profile literatures such as practice theory. Still, there are other studies that emerged over the last decade focusing on the Westernized character of norms. Norms, in this view, are biased, as they reinforce globally stratified social structures that exclude certain states, especially those outside of the West, as much as they include. Consider Ayse Zarakol’s work on liminal societies or states, such as Turkey, Japan, and Russia (or the Soviet Union), that are within the West but also outside of the West.2 The normalizing function of norms in that case led to the stigmatization of these three states as outsiders, a designation with which they have grappled ever since—both in trying to be “part” of the West, but also outside and against the West. Zarakol has pushed this point further in a follow-up study, noting that in the norms literature, “internalization is treated as synonymous with socialization, socialization with compliance, and compliance with progress.”3 Yet for those in the non-West, internalization can occur without acceptance. In fact, such internalization can occur on the surface in certain states (via ratification), but be coupled with a rejection of the norm itself, especially when the norm is embodied in ways that the national society finds highly problematic. When we focus on norm contestation, might we miss those cases of norm stigmatization? Or are the two related?In this light, it is not a coincidence that Russia seems to be the state most concerned with the ways in which the Responsibility to Protect norm (which Wiener calls an “organizing principle”) was carried out several years after its emergence in international society. The norm later became contentious because of the way that the Responsibility to Protect norm was enacted during the 2011 Libya intervention. Russia and China (most notably) abstained from voting and thus allowed United Nations Security Council Resolutions 1970 and 1973 to pass in that case, given their limited nature. While these resolutions, supported by the Arab League, authorized a limited use of force to protect civilians, they also enabled a much broader mandate that went past Russia and China’s interpretations of the resolution and norm. The resolutions, which focused on the “protection of civilians,” were stretched by the intervening (mainly Western) powers to the point of toppling the Libyan regime itself. This development has led some scholars working on the Responsibility to Protect to conclude that the principle does not represent the “purported new consensus on a new norm.”4 Norms may not only stigmatize but also generate resistance. And in the case of Russia and China, such resistance will likely continue for some time.Wiener notes that “as the frontier of normativity is crossed, the likelihood of norm conflict grows.”5 When we consider norms as Zarakol views them, the “frontier” of norm contestation shifts from states to civilizations, with states like Turkey and Japan that are (or have been), on the fault line, “liminal” societies.6 That is, they are neither within the West nor outside of it, but somewhere betwixt and between. Further, in today’s post-modern, technological age, is it useful to call norm engagements border crossings?We might approach the notion of contestation from a second angle. What are we to make of those countries or groups that reject norms in a different way: not because they are Western or non-Western, but because norms in general are an affront to their supposedly exceptional nature, and/or their own democratic (thin or thick) culture. In a series of studies,7 I have investigated the United States’ recent (re)embrace of torture, something that portends a more radical form of contestation—a rejection—of the anti-torture norm (in certain contexts) that has also drawn the attention of a number of scholars.8 This resistance to and then rejection of this norm has proceeded in stages, not necessarily correlating with increased security threats to the United States. Rather, this resistance began through a process of increasing debate among U.S. political actors on what torture involves. Initially, it appeared that the increase in public support for torture was a result of obfuscation—beginning with the infamous Bybee memo—regarding the definition of what constitutes torture. Yet surveys over the past decade and especially the past five years indicate increased public support not only for the euphemism of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” but also for “torture” itself; the U.S. public has never been more supportive of torture, at least in ways that reject the clear understanding of what is prohibited by the 1994 United Nations Convention against Torture and the domestic laws that ratified that convention.9In fact, some U.S. political representatives have responded to this increasing public support by issuing their own support for various forms of torture. The candidates competing in the Republican Party’s 2016 presidential primary repeatedly issued their support for bringing back waterboarding, a favorite torture tactic used on detainees suspected of terrorism by the Central Intelligence Agency, and authorized by the George W. Bush administration in the 2000s.10 The Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump, asserted in a February 2016 debate with fellow Republican candidates that he “would bring back waterboarding and I’d bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.”11 Marco Rubio, another leading contender in the primary at the time, asserted in a January debate that “if we capture any of these ISIS killers alive, they are going to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and we’re going to find out everything they know.”12 As the transcripts for both of these debates indicate, such comments were followed by enthusiastic audience applause. What are we to make, in light of the robustness of the anti-torture norm going back to the early Cold War era, of not only the lack of democratic restraints, but also the emerging democratic incentives to supporting torture in the United States?This issue is complicated further by the observation that for some of these politicians and their voters, the fact that international institutions, norms, treaties, and conventions prohibit the United States (and all countries) from doing something is reason enough to do it. Rubio in the February debate asserted ominously that “Barack Obama is undertaking a systematic effort to change this country, to make America more like the rest of the world.” What comes through here is a norm that is not only contested but rebelled against, precisely because, as Jason Ralph has persuasively conjectured regarding the Rome Statute and the International Criminal Court,13 the United States sees itself as defending democracy by opposing international norms and institutions.What I am pushing for here may seem like a shallow “gotcha” empirical question. I am using an exceptional circumstance and case to try and problematize Wiener’s very formal, trenchant, and sophisticated general theory of contestations. Yet this case is one not merely of contestation, but of flat out rebellious or celebratory rejection of a norm—and it is within a democracy where this resistance emerges. This may be counterintuitive since democracies seem to be the types of governments that respect norms and community standards as the basis for order and stability. In this case, there are democratic factors that fuel the rejection of the norm.A final point concerns where some of this rejection emerges. The conjecture I’ve sketched in previous work is that part of the U.S. rebellion against norms and in particular the anti-torture norm originates and becomes reinforced within micro-political settings.14 Wiener asserts that the “where” of contestation—which she asserts is “of prime interest here for the theory of contestation’’—occurs in the intermediary level of norms and the “referring stage” of compliance.15 Yet this somewhat narrows—perhaps too much—the analytical and political terrain where contestation takes place. Put another way, are not norms contested, negotiated, or embodied in other stages as well, all the way down, even? Or is this stage or level our best, first reference (heuristically) for investigating norm contestation? What do we mean when we talk about the space of contestation, which also seems to me to be perhaps a time more than a space?The point is not only analytical; it is political and even normative, in every respect. What we see driving norm contestation or rejection focuses not only our analytical attention but also our assumptions concerning how such rejection can be combated (but not, of course, ever fully reversed). When I first issued my remarks on A Theory of Contestation at an APSA roundtable, some members of the audience responded that torture’s popularity in the United States is really an elite-driven phenomenon. If this were true when it came to this case, and other cases of norm contestation, I would sleep better at night. For as thorny as elites can and will be when it comes to norms, in democratic communities and even some non-democratic ones, leaders and elites can be, and are, replaced. Yet it seems that the space of norm rejection extends past the halls of national power and into the fabric of a broader political community, into micro-political spaces, such as churches, coffee shops, athletic events, dining room tables, high school or family reunions, and even the college classroom. Engaging such a possibility would allow for us to develop the kind of “agonistic constructivism” that Havercroft and Duvall invoke in their contribution to this symposium, which they see as unfolding “through practices of contestation at all scales of human life from the local to the global.”16 Or, to consider the space of contestation more broadly, norms are indeed, as Zimmerman notes in her contribution, “subject to processes of change and need to be interpreted in specific contexts,” including these micro-political ones.17Although it is a welcome critique of the liberal or conventional constructivist interpretations of norms, A Theory of Contestation could perhaps go further and ask whether the politics of norm contestation (and resistance) stems from something within liberalism itself. The strident constructivist critiques, especially from an emerging generation of constructivist scholars, have focused just as much on challenging liberalism18 and its neoconservative expressions in U.S. foreign policy19 as they have been on norms and their diffusion through international society. In other words, is there something about liberal epistemology—something that evaluates, judges, and ranks, using “universal” criteria—that makes liberals prone toward not only advocating but even outwardly enforcing standards of behavior that they otherwise find universally accepted? Put another way, norms are standards of conduct; liberalism promotes not only these standards but standardization itself. It proffers a whole evaluative ideology that “measures” other countries up against a series of liberal markers (economic, political, institutional, and cultural). Thus, Wiener’s work on the contestation of norms could help us investigate whether there exists something deeper within liberalism—a “will to judge others.”I make these closing observations not as damning evidence of the shortcomings of A Theory of Contestation, but rather as an appraisal for the types of conversations that can and should unfold regarding international norms, now that we have a productive and foundational reference point for understanding and evaluating their contestation. Notes Brent J. Steele is the Francis D. Wormuth Presidential Chair and Professor of Political Science at the University of Utah. He is the author of Alternative Accountabilities in Global Politics: The Scars of Violence (Routledge, 2013); Defacing Power: The Aesthetics of Insecurity in Global Politics (University of Michigan Press, 2010) and Ontological Security in International Relations (Routledge, 2008). He is also the co-editor of three books, and has published articles in a number of international studies journals. He can be reached at [email protected].The author would like to thank Jonathan Havercroft for organizing this symposium and for the roundtable that preceded it. He thanks those who participated in the roundtable and this symposium for enriching his understanding of the text, and especially Professor Wiener for her provocative and rich book.1. Antje Wiener, A Theory of Contestation (London: Springer, 2014), 5.2. Ayse Zarakol, After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2011).3. Ayse Zarakol, “What Made the World Hang Together? Socialization or Stigmatization?” International Theory 6 (2014): 311–32, at 316.4. Eric A. Heinze and Helen Kerwin, “International Norms and Human Security: Libya, R2P, and the Humanitarian Intervention Consensus,” in State Responses to Human Security: At Home and Abroad, ed. Courtney Hillebrecht, Tyler R. White, and Patrice C. McMahon (New York: Routledge, 2014), 148–70.5. Wiener, Theory of Contestation, 31 (see note 1 above).6. On liminality, see Maria Mälksoo, “Liminality and Contested Europeanness: Conflicting Memory Politics in the Baltic Space,” Identity and Foreign Policy: Baltic-Russian Relations and European Integration, ed. Eiki Berg and Piret Ehin (Ashgate Publishing: Burlington, Vt.: 2009): 65–84; Bahar Rumelili, “Liminal Identities and Processes of Domestication and Subversion in International Relations,” Review of International Studies 38 (2012): 495–508.7. Brent J. Steele, “Organizational Processes and Ontological (in)Security: Torture, the CIA and the United States,” forthcoming in Cooperation and Conflict (2017); “The Insecurity of America: The Curious Case of Torture’s Escalating Popularity,” in Justice, Sustainability, and Security: Global Ethics for the 21st Century, ed. Eric A. Heinze (London: Palgrave, 2010), 171–205; Defacing Power: The Aesthetics of Insecurity in Global Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008); “Ideals That Were Never Really in Our Possession: Torture, Honor and US Identity,” International Relations 22 (2008): 243–61.8. Christopher Kutz ,“How Norms Die: Torture and Assassination in American Security Policy,” Ethics and International Affairs 28 (2014): 425–49; Ryder McKeown, “Norm Regress: US Revisionism and the Slow Death of the Torture Norm,” International Relations 23 (2009): 5–25.9. Steele, “Organizational Processes” (see note 7 above).10. Steele, “Ideals” (see note 7 above).11. Ryan Teague Beckwith, “Transcript of the Eighth Republican Debate in New Hampshire,” Time, February 7, 2016, accessed at http://time.com/4210921/republican-debate-transcript-new-hampshire-eighth/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+timeblogs%2Fswampland+(TIME%3A+Swampland).12. Washington Post, “7th Republican Debate: Annotated,” January 28, 2016, accessed at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/01/28/7th-republican-debate-transcript-annotated-who-said-what-and-what-it-meant/#annotations:8594711.13. The Rome Statute established the International Criminal Court. It was agreed upon in 1998 and went into effect in 2002. See Jason Ralph, “International Society, the International Criminal Court, and American Foreign Policy,” Review of International Studies 31 (2005), 27–44, at 42.14. Brent J. Steele “The Insecurity of America,” 184 (see note 7 above).15. Wiener, Theory of Contestation, 49 (see note 1 above).16. Jonathan Havercroft and Raymond Duvall, “Challenges of an Agonistic Constructivism for International Relations,” Polity 49 (2017): 156–64, at 157.17. Lisbeth Zimmermann, “‘Inter-National’ Habermas: Contestation and Understanding under Conditions of Diversity,” Polity 49 (2017): 149–55, at 153.18. Brent J. Steele, “Liberal-Idealism: A Constructivist Critique,” International Studies Review 9 (2007): 23–52.19. Ty Solomon, The Politics of Subjectivity in American Foreign Policy Discourses (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015). Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Polity Volume 49, Number 1January 2017Perpetual Struggle The Journal of the Northeastern Political Science Association Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/689981HistoryPublished online December 14, 2016 © 2017 Northeastern Political Science Association. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Roger Karapin Perpetual Struggle, Polity 49, no.11 (Dec 2016): 1–4.https://doi.org/10.1086/689973Lisbeth Zimmermann “Inter-National” Habermas: Contestation and Understanding under Conditions of Diversity, Polity 49, no.11 (Dec 2016): 149–155.https://doi.org/10.1086/689976Jonathan Havercroft Introduction, Polity 49, no.11 (Dec 2016): 100–108.https://doi.org/10.1086/689979Antje Wiener A Reply to My Critics, Polity 49, no.11 (Jan 2017): 165–184.https://doi.org/10.1086/690101