Normative Order Research Articles

“Two normative orders”: Time, the body, and memory in Okey Ndibe’s Foreign Gods, Inc.

ABSTRACT Foreign Gods, Inc. by Nigerian American writer Okey Ndibe (2014) features the protagonist’s return to his native Nigeria to steal the statue of the local deity for monetary gain. The novel establishes the connection between the loss of respect for the Indigenous belief system and the forces of colonialism and their aftermath in a globalized context. This article argues that the novel’s theme occurs through unifying into realistic representation the three principles of Igbo epistemology – interconnectedness, cause and effect, and reincarnation – as encoded in time, the body, and memory. These dual orders endorse a powerful vision of nature and question the anthropocentric vision embedded in colonialism and capitalism. By incorporating the principles of these dual orders, the novel displays the rich cosmos of the Igbo community that disrupts the discourse of othering and discourages its continuation in the contemporary world.

Revisiting forum shopping: navigating normative pluralism, navigating sentiments

People live their lives and experience the conflicts in which they are involved in the context of competing normative orders. But how do people navigate this normative pluralism? To understand this, Keebet von Benda-Beckmann’s model of ‘forum shopping’ and ‘shopping forums’, derived from an ethnographic analysis of conflict resolution, remains an indispensable starting point. Building on this approach, I argue that in order to understand the navigation of normative orders more broadly, it is important to bring the analysis of sentiments to the study of normative pluralism. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on the International Criminal Court’s transitional justice interventions in northern Uganda, I argue that when confronted with different international, national, religious, and indigenous normative options for dealing with mass violence, people navigate normative pluralism by creating, mobilising, maintaining, and transforming sentiments.

The two faces of Franco-Sudanian Treaties: The peripheral practice of ratification as evidence of transregional international law in the nineteenth century

Abstract Legal scholars continue to revisit historical treaties between Western and non-Western nations to challenge long-standing accounts of non-Western peoples’ engagement with international law. Following this trend, new scholarship has stressed African agency in Euro-African treaty-making. However, legal scholars have generally overlooked African perspectives, pointing to a lack of sources. Focusing on nineteenth-century treaty-making between France and the polities of the Western Sudan in West Africa, this article excavates African perspectives through a novel reading of Euro-African treaties in an African context. This reading analyses treaties within the Western Sudan’s broader diplomatic corpus in both French and Arabic. By focusing on markers of translation, transcription, and negotiation left on different copies of treaties, this method brings to light arguments and practices that have been obscured in published European-language versions. Reading Franco-Sudanian treaties in a Sudanian context reveals that different norms governed the ratification of treaties in the Western Sudan and Europe. Treaties that scholars have long considered unratified were in fact ratified according to Western Sudanian norms, which designated the governor of French Senegal rather than the French president as the official competent to ratify treaties for France. However, when French officials sought to use treaties to claim sovereign rights in West Africa against Great Britain, they pressed the president to ratify them again. Presidential ratification thus served to transpose Franco-Sudanian treaties from an African to a Western normative order. Uncovering the African origins of Euro-African treaties thus reveals their differential operation across autonomous inter-polity orders.

State Violence, Divine Abuse

Abstract It is tempting to attribute state violence to the imposition of a normative order, and it is tempting to construct an opposition between sanctifying that order and messianic interruptions of that order. This framework supposes that God, and the surrounding language of the sacred, follows the logic of rule, imposing a set of expectations on what is to be done enforced by threat of punishment. But what if we centre the story of Job in our account of the divine and with it an image of God as abuser rather than ruler, that is, God as only imposing the phantom of norms, norms that shift or evaporate as soon as they are imposed, never fulfilling a promise of reward or threat of punishment as expected? I explore this possibility through brief encounters with two texts on the racial violence of the state, one by Aimé Césaire and the other by the contemporary Black American writer Kiese Laymon.

THE ROLE OF SOCIAL MEMORY IN THE SOCIETAL TRANSFORMATIONS OF MODERN BELARUSIAN SOCIETY: THE THEORETICAL ASPECT

This study employs a socio-philosophical analysis to reveal the role of social memory in the societal transformations of contemporary Belarusian society and highlights the importance of this phenomenon in shaping its socio-cultural development. The theoretical and methodological framework for this research includes societal functionalism, an anthroposocietal approach, the concept of social transformations in post-Soviet societies, and an informational approach to the study of social memory. These approaches enable a detailed exploration of how social memory influences societal transformations in modern Belarus, allowing for an assessment of its normative, value-based, and functional potential in establishing and maintaining a normative order, fostering social stability, and generating tension within the socio-cultural space.

‘24/7 horny&training’: porn bots, authenticity, and social automation on Instagram

ABSTRACT This article presents a conceptual and methodological account of a small porn bot network, focusing on its embeddedness within Instagram use. The analysis explores the gendered design of bots as platform-native personas, particularly their capacity to perform within the confines of Instagram’s increasingly strict sexual content controls. We address three performative trajectories in the bot-exploited ‘Instagrammatics’ of identity play, social influence, and attention capture. We argue that a bot programmed to operate with sexual content to generate attention relies on the paradoxical blend of pornographic ‘imagination’ and social media ‘authenticity’. For our analysis, we manually identified 30 porn bot accounts spamming in the comment sections of highly visible Instagram posts (those published by @justinbieber). We then collected associated metadata – bot profile names and images, comments and comment likers, followers and followings, bot content, and links in the bot profile bios. By variously situating and combining these data, we discuss how networked automation taps into the sexualized social scripts imitated by ‘artificial’ and ‘authentic’ users alike. Our findings point to how porn bots re-enact gender as a programmed set of instructions, adapting to Instagram’s vision of acceptable sexuality and revealing its normative order.

Strange Case of Dr. Bidder and Mr. Entrant: Consumer Preference Inconsistencies in Costly Price Offers

Consumers make price offers to sellers in a variety of domains, such as when buying cars or houses or when bidding in auctions for airline upgrades, art, or collectibles. Submitting an offer typically entails administrative, waiting, and opportunity costs. Making such costly price offers involves two intertwined decisions—in addition to determining how much to offer, consumers must also decide whether to make an offer in the first place. We examine the impact of offer-submission costs on consumer behavior using a series of incentive-compatible experiments. Our findings reveal a preference inconsistency, whereby the preferences implied by one of the decisions do not align with the preferences implied by the other. In particular, potential buyers enter more often than their offer amounts would predict based on standard economic models. This preference inconsistency is robust to two interventions designed to help consumers make offer-amount and entry decisions—(1)the provision of interactive-feedback decision aids and (2)the sequencing of the two sub-decisions in the normative order. Neither of these interventions resolves the inconsistency. Instead, the patterns of results suggest that consumers approach the offer-amount and entry decisions as if they were unrelated. We discuss the implications of our findings for the design of offer-submission interfaces, as well as for econometric attempts to infer consumer preferences from offer and bidding data.

Legal Pluralism in South Africa: The Implications of Co-Existing Customary and Civil Marriages

In South Africa marriage was a key site of colonial legal pluralism. Family formation and marriage were central to upholding boundaries between colonial and local normative orders. Under the umbrella of a single set of fundamental constitutional rights, post-apartheid law nevertheless retains separate statutes, precedents and legal rules for different cultural and religious marriages. This can lead to legal gaps and uncertainty when people enter into simultaneous or coexisting marriages, especially when the same couple concludes a customary marriage together with a civil marriage. This article examines the current configuration and implications of legal pluralism in South Africa by analsysing the interaction between coexisting customary and civil marriages between the same spouses. It identifies three themes in the relationship between these marriages: a hierarchy which continues to privilege civil law over other legal and normative systems; second, failure on the part of the legislature to clarify confusing aspects of the interaction between these forms of marriage and, finally, gaps which neither applicable legal system addresses satisfactorily. It also illustrates the political failure of the legislature, almost thirty years after the advent of democracy, decisively to address the socio-economic problems created by pluralism and the inadequate regulation of customary marriages.

Re-thinking Global Governance as Fuzzy: Multi-Scalar Boundaries of Responsibility in the Arctic

ABSTRACT The article reconsiders global governance as fuzzy and situated across multiple scales rather than multi-level. It revisits Global Governance research, whose introspective focus on opening “black boxes” has marginalized “in-between” approaches. The article highlights the value of “in-between” approaches for mid-range theorizing on global normative order using the Arctic as an example. It shows how sovereignty and “projects of belonging” unfold across diverse fora in designating “responsibility.” In legal, cultural, and epistemic contexts, boundary work by national and non-state actors demarcates jurisdiction and shields claims of responsibility to prevent others from gaining rights or access to the region. Through examples, the article demonstrates that normative boundary practices do not form a homogenous project of belonging. Instead, these practices blur the lines of where “all things Arctic” are negotiated, who holds legitimate voice to influence governance, and complicate long-term decision-making.

The practical philosophy of Immanuel Kant and the modern ethics of responsibility

The article deals with the practical philosophy of Immanuel Kant, its transformation in the modern ethics of responsibility and the significance of «risks and threats» for modern society. It is emphasized that in Ukraine, in particular, in the H.S. Skovoroda Institute of Philosophy of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, a powerful historical-philosophical tradition of research in German classical philosophy has developed, the foundation of which is the philosophy of I. Kant. This trend gained a new development after the restoration of Ukraine's independence. Special attention was paid in the investigation to the study of Kant's moral philosophy, its important component – the categorical imperative. It is shown that Kant's practical philosophy became an important driver of the leading trends of modern philosophy in the world, which was manifested in the process of «rehabilitation of practical philosophy», which includes the philosophy of responsibility of H. Jonas, communicative philosophy and ethics of discourse. These trends prompted the search for new formulations of the categorical imperative. The relevance of Kant's practical philosophy is evident especially today, under the conditions of modern technological civilization, the destruction of the normative order in the world, and the crisis of moral guidelines. Kant's concept of the primacy of the practical (moral and ethical) mind over the theoretical, technical and instrumental mind opens up ways to solve the global problems of our time, especially in the conditions of crisis and war. Kant's anniversary coincides with a special period of Ukrainian history: the modernization of Ukrainian society, the restoration of national identity, and orientation towards universal values. This event acquires special significance in view of the Russian aggression against Ukraine. Distorting the enlightment, moral-ethical and universalistic direction of Kant's philosophy, Russian propaganda tries to use it for ideological and propaganda purposes. That is why events dedicated to Kant's anniversary are an important component in the fight against the Russian aggressor.

Competing Claims of Caliphal Legitimacy: Al-Tamaghrouti’s Rihla and the Moroccan-Ottoman Early Modern Diplomatic Landscape

This article explores al-Tamaghrouti’s Rihla, Al-Nafhah al-Miskia fi al-Sifarah al-Turkiyah [The Fragrant Breeze in the Turkish Embassy], to illuminate his engagement with the spiritual and temporal legitimacy of caliphal claims in the early modern Islamicate Mediterranean. It argues that Moroccan embassies to the Sublime Porte were arenas where claims to temporal and spiritual superiority played themselves out in the form of competing caliphal symbolism. When situated within Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur’s caliphal vision, Al-Tamaghrouti’s account reveals a discursive landscape marked by contrasting claims to the superiority of the Moroccan normative order. His Rihla vividly captures the double-bind challenges faced by al-Mansur’s Morocco in the sixteenth century: Iberian imperialism and Ottoman expansionism. I resituate the insight that dynamic interactions among various Muslim-Christian universalistic principles maintained a paradoxical longevity of peaceful relations (Windler 2018) within the rubric of Muslim-Muslim relations to explore how different universalistic ideologies interact within inter-imperial/religious Muslim relations, particularly in the context of diplomatic engagements and political interactions. Al-Tamaghrouti drew on various spiritual and temporal motifs to construe a space of hermeneutic ambiguity whereby Sultan al-Mansur’s claims to universal caliphal leadership not only fulfills Mahdist qualities but transcends them, construing a discursive field in which al-Mansur emerges as a leader who transcends prophetic norms. By analyzing the interplay of power, religion, and diplomacy in al-Tamaghrouti’s travelogue, we gain a deeper understanding of the intricacies of statecraft and the ongoing pursuit of legitimacy in the Islamic world.

Interpretive Methods in Disability Studies: Dyslexia Inflected Inquiry

This article explores how disability studies can take shape as an interpretive method and how disability-perception can influence this. My exploration is organized in relation to the following question: In what ways might attention to dyslexia as an interpretive act inflect social inquiry? I treat interpretive methods as a form of inquiry that attends to the social activity of interpretation itself and I regard dyslexia as part of such activity. A key issue for such inquiry is how to methodically engage appearances as an interpretive encounter: That is, how can we make the taken-for-granted activity of perception as interpretation available for reflection and keep the subject ∞ object chiasma* relation a primary focus? Disability studies is a starting point for such inquiry in at least two ways: (a) it brings to attention the ways in which people interpret disability and (b) it considers how impairment experience itself is an interpretive modality that can momentarily disrupt the normative flow of common-sense, revealing aspects of the act of interpretation, and making it available for reflection. This article will show how the perception of disability as well as disability-perception can be regarded as enacting a “pause” in the everyday flow of common-sense and, thereby, encounter interpretive acts as an occasion for further inquiry. I turn to descriptions of perceptions and experiences of dyslexia as interpretive scenes where the normative order of ordinary interpretation can be revealed. I address various ways that dyslexia is described as a disruption to the normative order of language, especially the written word, print-language, even as the term dyslexia is used as a sense-making-device to reassert the primacy of normative expectations and values in literate-culture. As a sense-making-device imposed from without or as experience that seems to come from within, or as both, the appearance of “dyslexia” serves as a primal scene for uncovering the ways in which the social order of interpretation works. *Chiasma is not a dyslexic rendering of “chasm.” Instead, chiasma refers to the crosswise relation between concepts and structures that rely on each other for their meaning, for example, reading and readers; subject and object.

Sub-Saharan Irregular Migrant Women's Sexuality: A Qualitative Study in Humanitarian Reception Centers.

Irregular female migration to Europe is a growing phenomenon, as more and more women are fleeing their countries of origin due to gender inequality and violence. During the migration process, women experience physical, psychological and social problems that affect their sex lives. The aim of our study is to describe and understand how irregular migrant women living in humanitarian reception centers experience their sexuality at different stages of the migration process. This qualitative phenomenological study collected data through sixteen in-depth interviews with irregular migrant women between January and February 2023. Data analysis was carried out using ATLAS-ti 23.0 software, from which three themes were extracted: (1) The reality of sub-Saharan women's sexuality, (2) In search of a better life: the choice between taking the risk or surrendering, and (3) The sexual revolution among migrants. Sub-Saharan women's sexuality is subject to a complex normative order. The migratory process has severe consequences on migrant women's sex life. The sexual needs of irregular migrant women admitted to humanitarian reception centers undergo a process of change that must be understood by healthcare providers in order to make improvements to care provision.

The Legal Implications of Establishing Land Bank As An Entity Authorized to Manage Land

Land is an important resource that controls the livelihoods of many people. Land has social, economic, cultural and even spiritual value. The presence of the state based on Article 33 paragraph (3) of the 1945 Constitution of the Republic of Indonesia (UUD NRI 1945) is to regulate land allocation in a fair manner. This is also stated in the UUPA. However, since the presence of the Land Bank, it has actually triggered problems, especially in the normative order, in this case what is highlighted is the conflict of norms. Leads to two problem formulations. First, what is the essence of the Land Bank's regulation as a body that is given the authority to manage land? Second, what are the legal implications of regulating the Land Bank as a body given the authority to manage land? Using normative legal research methods, with a statutory statute approach and theoretical approach. The resulting analysis shows that the current Land Bank regulations in Law no. 6 / 2023 in conjunction with PP No. 64 / 2021, turns out to have closer economic nuances. This also shows a lack of harmony with Article 33 paragraph (3) of the 1945 Constitution of the Republic of Indonesia, UUPA and the objectives of agrarian reform. This regulation has legal implications, both philosophically, normatively and sociologically. Therefore, it is necessary to evaluate and reorganize Land Bank regulations in Indonesia so that they provide legal certainty and more equitable use.

“Green peppers, tomatoes, and lemons, disunite!”: Feminist solidarity in times of wars

AbstractThis article focuses on female bodies co‐laboring across the racial lines and academic‐activist divides to explore both the potentials and constraints of feminist solidarity in the hyper‐masculine and ultra‐nationalist normative order of the global war on terror. Anthropological studies have deconstructed phantasmatic narratives of the global war on terror by disclosing its racialized and classed structure. However, what remains understudied is how racialized female bodies are subjected to the biopower and necropower of this war. This ethnography concentrates on the feminist solidarity between Özlem Yasak and Serra Hakyemez, the coauthors of this article, which stretches over 13 years and moves between the colony and the metropole and the Global South and Global North. It examines how a Turkish academic and a Kurdish activist (both lower middle‐class women) forge, cultivate, and repair their comradeship as they move from an immigration office to their family house to neoliberal universities. Based on what we call the Other‐graphy as a new feminist method, this article argues that the global war on terror expands its reach as the humanitarian and neoliberal regimes of power recruit activists and academics to the fantasy of autonomous subjectivity posited against their possible political solidarity.

Normative Pluralism and Sporting Integrity

ABSTRACT Official documents, such as the Word Anti-Doping Code (WADC), argue that sport can be deemed a homogenous and unitary concept. Even where different sports have varying characteristics, the homogenous view of a given sport (‘a sport’ or ‘the sport’) persists. The WADC, international and national sport associations aim to protect the spirit of (the) sport. In this picture, the intersection of sporting integrity and legal processes occupies a vital place. The article will posit that, from a legal perspective sport is heterogeneous due to its governance, regulation, adjudication, and enforcement structures. International and national associations, such as sport federations and leagues, have separate normative orders. These normative orders lead to differences in ensuring sporting integrity. A plural normative environment is inherent in sport; thus, we need to deal with it. The article will conclude that although harmonising norms and interpretations related to sporting integrity through national and global institutions may be acceptable, these must be achieved by promoting good governance and human rights.

Thinking different as an act of resistance: Reconceptualizing the German protests in the COVID-19 pandemic as an emergent counter-knowledge order

Massive anti-government protests erupted during the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany. The crisis activated a potential for resistance that has been simmering under the impositions of late-modern knowledge society. Made salient by the pandemic conditions of sudden extreme reliance on scientific (non) knowledge, the corona protestors activated this potential for resistance and constructed their own counter-knowledge order bound by shared resentment of and distrust in the established order and facilitated by digital platforms. Utilising social network analysis and structural topic modeling for digital critical discourse analysis, in this paper I explore how the corona protest counter-knowledge order is constructed with a particular focus on its contexts, roles, and hierarchies. I find that far-right and conspiracy imaginations are used to level out hierarchies and detach epistemic roles from their contexts to reinstate a superior self into interpretative power. The counter-knowledge order’s inherent construction of unwarranted omnipotence points to a more fundamental resistance to the established normative orders of our society that should be addressed more effectively if we want to be prepared for future crises and not lose common ground for making sense of them.

Trans Times: Que(e)rying Normative Logics of Temporality, Gender, and Sexuality in Virginia Woolf's <em>Orlando</em>

Prefiguring contemporary inquiries into queer and trans temporality, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography explores temporal politics of sexual and gendered identity amidst socio-historical developments in modernism. In her critique of prevailing nineteenth-century presumptions about human experience and related biologically determined, chronologically structured lifetimes, Woolf creates an untimely, gender-variant character resistant to normative order. To conceptualize Orlando’s non-normative temporality and gender identifications, this article draws from the threefold framework developed in Fisher, Phillips, and Katri’s (2017) research on trans temporalities: ‘the construction, deconstruction, and resistant reconstruction of trans subjects’. Spanning from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, Orlando’s queer reality serves as dual resistance to norms of both time and gender; a confluence of constructed male past and deconstructed present as trans woman substantiates the gender variance and future reconstructions of the trans self within what this article introduces as a continuum. In consideration of modernist interactions with time and genderqueer life along with current theorizations of queer and trans temporalities, this article seeks to argue how the trans self modeled by Woolf emerges as asynchronous and ever-evolving. This article then offers, in the vein of Orlando’s transgender subjectivity, an exemplification of the potential to resist and subvert hetero- and chrononormativity in introducing alternative modes of lived reality that endorse unscheduled lifetimes and divergent relations to time, gender, and sexuality.

Glitterati and Grit: The Perils and Possibilities of Sports Mega-Event Research

Amid the whirling swirl of overlapping global crises—from extreme inequality and climate change to unaccountable elite power and securitized violence at the international and domestic levels—sport studies may, on their surface, appear superfluous. However, this article argues that critical academic scholarship on sports mega-events like the Olympic Games and soccer World Cup can, due to these events’ cultural power and global scope, be an effective way to simultaneously address the socio-structural problems that mark the 21st century. In this article, I argue that research on the cultural politics of sport can wedge open discursive space to challenge the hegemonic normative order and to potentially reap material gains from below. To that end, I delineate possible research avenues that sports mega-events stimulate, explicating the leverage they could achieve. Along the way, I argue for doing research and writing that is explicitly political. Last, leaning on recent examples of scholarship in sport studies and beyond, I assert the importance of concept building at the theoretical middle-level as well as writing critical descriptive histories.

Living law, normative pluralism, and “fare dodging” on public transport in Budapest

This paper explores a situation regulated by plural normative orders, which every-day public transport users and ticket inspectors experience and practice in the urban realm of the Hungarian capital city, Budapest. The paper analyses everyday interactions between members of the public and public transport staff (typically ticket inspectors) in ways which are not only regulated by formal rules, but which manifest in a non-state regulated normative order. By doing this, the paper theoretically engages with the interplay between multiple normative orders and the urban dynamics in which they operate. The norms which regulate these practices can exist because of how the public transport system operates in Budapest. The paper is based on twenty-five in-depth interviews conducted between February 2017 and March 2019 with long-term Hungarian residents and British migrants living in Budapest. A synthesis of Ehrlich’s “living law” theory and Moore’s concepts of “semi-autonomous social fields” provide the underlying theoretical framework to examine these informal interactions.