Practices of normative ordering during the 2002/2003 Iraq crisis

Protect and punish: norm linkage and international responses to mass atrocities

“…In doing so, they seek to convince their audiences – governments, domestic publics, international media and expert communities – that their actions are legitimate in the sense of being based on generally accepted standards. To achieve this, actors must draw on discursive repertoires shared by their audiences (Kornprobst, 2014; Niemann, 2018: 6). International norms are important parts of such collective repertoires.…”

“…This can, but does not need to imply that public justifications are insincere. Whether or not an actor privately believes in a public justification she advances, we can assume that she uses the argument because she believes it to bolster the legitimacy of her position (Hurd, 2007a: 32; Niemann, 2018: 100). Neither does strategic justification necessarily seek to defend fixed (national) interests.…”

“…Third, I assume that public justifications shape political outcomes. As Holger Niemann (2018: 201) argues, political actors engage in the time-consuming work of crafting public justifications because they believe that these normative arguments matter. They do not necessarily matter in the sense of convincing others to endorse the policy that a speaker is justifying; this cannot be ruled out, but is an unlikely result of highly formalized public exchanges.…”

“…IR scholars interested in legitimacy and justification emphasize ‘the fundamental role played by processes of legitimation and delegitimation in all that the Council does’ (Hurd, 2007a: 2). Since the Council cannot implement its decisions without the consent and cooperation of UN members, its members ‘attempt to legitimise their decisions by claiming them as rightful’ (Niemann, 2018: 2), thus at the same time engaging in a practice of ‘normative ordering’ (Niemann, 2018: 4–10). Furthermore, the UNSC is a key site of decision-making on judicial and non-judicial interventions.…”

“…8 Drawing on scholarship on legitimacy and justification in international politics (e.g. Kornprobst, 2014; Niemann, 2018), I argue that norm linkage allows governments to enlarge the repertoire of justifications they can use to defend their policy preferences, but also to reverse them and come to agreements. Over time, certain linkage arguments may gain discursive dominance, thus again constraining actors’ repertoires.…”