What makes the “norm” a distinct concept? How do norms differ from other aspects of the moral and social fabric of society? In this article I argue that imposing stricter boundaries on the norm concept could have significant analytical payoffs, especially in the human rights literature. Greater conceptual clarity on the boundaries of the norm concept highlights three important distinctions: the difference between norms and moral principles, norms and supererogatory standards, and norms and formal law. Clarifying what a norm is (and, importantly, what it is not) improves our analytic equipment and theories, but the inquiry is not purely a theoretical exercise. Clarifying the norm concept enables us to ask new questions about, and rethink old findings on issues like the role of shaming in human rights advocacy, the origins of norms and challenges to their construction, what constitutes evidence of the existence of a norm, and whether, in fact, all human rights have been translated into norms.

Aspiration is an essential component of politics. It articulates goals, affirms identities and values, and structures action at all levels of social life. Yet political scientists have spent little time theorizing aspiration—what it is, how it relates to other concepts, and the kinds of effects it creates. In this article, we develop the concept theoretically and argue that aspiration creates a distinct “aspirational politics” that differs from our international relations models of both norm-driven social activism and interest-driven rational choice. We identify three core features of aspiration that undergird its theoretical utility: lofty goals, change over time, and transformation through imagination. In the hands of skilled political actors, aspiration does essential work in both facilitating agreement and mobilizing social action that create change in the world. However, aspiration also has a dark side and can be manipulated to dodge accountability, postpone action, and serve private, rather than public, goals.

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Food insecurity poses one of the most pressing development and human security challenges in the world. This book examines the social and normative environments in which international anti-hunger organizations are working and argues that despite international law ascribing responsibility to national governments to ensure the right to food of their citizens, there is no shared social consensus on who ought to do what to solve the hunger problem. The book provides a new analytic model of transnational advocacy. In investigating advocacy around a critical economic and social right — the right to food — the book challenges existing understandings of the relationships among human rights, norms, and laws. Most important, the book provides an expanded conceptual tool kit with which we can examine and understand the social and moral forces at play in rights advocacy.

This chapter focuses on contemporary international anti-hunger advocacy, which describes the nature of contemporary campaigns across top international anti-hunger organizations. It introduces dominant human rights models, namely Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink's “boomerang model” and Thomas Risse, Stephen C. Ropp, and Kathryn Sikkink's “spiral model.” It also provides an alternative model of advocacy, the “buckshot model,” which describes and explains advocacy around hunger and the right to food. The chapter identifies the hidden assumptions behind dominant human rights models and explores their limitations by using the hunger case to set up a contrast with more-often-studied civil and political rights campaigns. It reviews interviews with international anti-hunger activists that were completed by 2015, which reflected contemporary campaigns and efforts until 2014.