Changing ideas, changing norms: The case of ‘the responsibility to rebuild’

Abstract

Whilst much has been written on emergence of new norms in international politics, we know significantly less about changes to the ideas and assumptions that underpin such norms. Examined at micro-level, most norms consist of a set of ideas and assumptions that form the basis of what is considered as appropriate, legitimate or even the required thing to do. Far from being stable, ideational constitutions of norms can undergo significant changes in the course of the norm emergence process. Enquiring into such changes is important if we are to move beyond static and linear accounts of norm evolution. Using changes in the ideational constitution of the responsibility to protect – specifically, the de-emphasis of the responsibility to rebuild – as its vantage point, the analysis seeks to answer the following question: what drives change in ideational constitutions of international norms? The chief argument advanced in this article is that misalignments at the level of broader normative structures (external misalignments) and within norms (internal misalignments) result in changes in the ideational constitutions of emerging norms.

Unbowed, unbent, unbroken? Examining the validity of the responsibility to protect

“…Jess Gifkins went as far as saying that R2P remained untouched and improved in terms of acceptance (Gifkins, 2016). The sheer variety of assumptions concerning R2P’s assumed legacy (Donovan, 2018; Jacob, 2018) make uniform theoretical expectations hard to come by. Instead, scholars can be roughly distinguished into two camps: those who think that the validity of the norm has improved over time and those who think the validity has worsened over time.…”