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

Abstract

Since being founded in 2002, the International Criminal Court has frequently intervened in ongoing conflicts and alongside other forms of coercive intervention, specifically sanctions and military measures. In this article, I argue that this pattern has been enabled by governments engaging in strategic norm linkage. To justify their positions on both judicial and non-judicial interventions, governments have discursively linked international prosecutions to the protection of civilians – in specific ways that have favoured joint judicial and non-judicial crisis responses. My argument, which I test through qualitative and quantitative content analyses of UN Security Council debates, contributes not only to debates on the politics of international criminal justice, but also to general theory-building on international norm dynamics. Adding to recent research on norm complexity and norm interactions, my study underlines and disaggregates the potential for discursive agency at the intersection of multiple international norms.

Liberal-democratic norms under contestation: Norm relations and their decoupling in the US Supreme Court’s decisions on abortion

“…Lantis and Wunderlich 2022: 8). They identify norm bundles containing several fundamental norms (True and Wiener 2019), norm linkagesthat is, the co-occurrence of two or more independent norms (Fehl 2023), norm clusters as the multi-faceted relations between several problems, values and behaviour (Winston 2018), norm complexes capturing norm relations and norm interactions (Fehl and Rosert 2020), and norm clusters as collections of different norms related to a common issue area Wunderlich 2018, 2022). Much of this research examines how the relations between norms or their elements contribute to the norms' resilience (Lantis and Wunderlich 2018) or diffusion (Winston 2018).…”

“…Studying the contestation of norms by analysing the relations between and decoupling of norms, this article draws on international relations (IR) norms research on norm clustersthat is, the relations and linkages between norms (Fehl 2023;Fehl and Rosert 2020;Wunderlich 2018, 2022;Winston 2018). The article contributes to this research by shedding light on the other side of norm relationswhen hitherto related norms are decoupled.…”