Much scholarship in International Relations has sought to go beyond traditional state-centric conceptions and widen discourse to include more pluralist and interdisciplinary scholarship, which seeks to take account of a broader range of actors at all levels of global society. At the same time, and relatedly, contemporary constructivist scholarship has focused on the importance of shared ideas and norms as a means to understand the practice of actors within the global system, as well as the manner in which global governance institutions are constructed and operate. It is to this wider, more ‘global’, conception of International Relations that Antje Wiener's Constitution and contestation of norms in global international relations seeks to contribute. Beginning from the moral premise of quod omnis tangit (what touches all must be approved by all), the book seeks to address questions of norm emergence, diffusion and construction by examining the role of affected stakeholders in the practice of norm validation. In this way, Wiener seeks to understand the normative dynamics at the intersection of the local and the global, or as she describes it, ‘the co-constitution’ of the local and the global (p. 3). The book is concerned with both norms as structures and their interaction within structures, distinguishing between a formal ‘constitution’ of the norm and a more empirical and practical ‘meaning in use’, which is constantly susceptible to change. Building on earlier work, Wiener claims that the concept and practice of contestation need to form the bedrock of any exploratory contribution, to better understand the nature of stakeholder norm engagement and the dynamics of normative change. In doing so, Wiener asks and addresses the question ‘whose practices count?’, which she already posed in an earlier work (‘Evolving norms of constitutionalism’, European Law Journal 9(S1), 2003, pp. 1–13), while also seeking some resolution to the question of whose practices ought to count.