Following this workshop’s discussion of Rosenberg’s emphasis on societal multiplicity, this contribution discusses how and why this might generate an added value for IR as a discipline. To that end, it explores the promises of the concept of societal multiplicity as a deep ontology. It is argued that a key promise consists in the proposed ontology’s qualitative (‘more than one kind’) and quantitative (‘more than one’) dimensions as drivers of international relations practice and theory. Both drivers work across societal boundaries and within societies alike, thereby developing interrelated and mutually reinforcing dynamics. Programmatically, the promises of societal multiplicity remain to be explored with reference to Rosenberg’s five potential consequences (i.e. co-existence, difference, interaction, combination, and dialectical change. Specifically, a central promise lies in its potential to fill the research gap which consists of the absence of social contract theory (i.e. as offering the conceptual angle on the ‘unbound’ quality of fundamental norms, based on the ‘politics of recognition’) for legitimate global governance. Here, societal multiplicity sheds light on societal negotiations of values, thereby adding to extant practice and agency-based theories of international ordering. This article illustrates the point with reference to the subfield of norms research. It shows how extant concepts of political practices vis-a-vis norms stand to benefit from applying societal multiplicity insofar as it targets the contingency of international ordering through societal interaction. This matters because societal and political ordering in a globalised space does not begin from a given ‘liberal community’ (top-down) but from a socially constructed emerging set of orders (bottom-up). The argument is presented in four sections. Section 1 presents the turn towards societal multiplicity as a deep ontology in order to address the absence of social contract theory in IR. It identifies a gap between the ‘use’ of fundamental norms for global governance purposes, on the one hand, and the ‘contestations’ of their implementation by affected stakeholders, on the other. Section 2 addresses the point of re-establishing IR as a lone standing discipline in the social sciences. Against the current state of a fragmented discipline, it asks how a shift towards societal multiplicity might work towards countering that fragmentation. Section 3 turns to the norms research literature. To illustrate the argument it explores potential pathways towards filling the gap between state-mediated and locally contested norms of global governance. Section 4 concludes with an outlook towards framing the crisis of international law as a value based.