Rhetorical Adaptation and Resistance to International Norms

Abstract

Scholarship on states’ responses to international norms has focused on commitment, compliance, and noncompliance; paying insufficient attention to responses that fall outside these categories. Beyond simply complying with or violating a norm; states contest, resist, and respond to international norms in a range of ways. I identifyrhetorical adaptationas a central form of resistance to international norms. Rather than simply rejecting a norm or charges of norm violation, such a strategy draws on a norm’s content to resist pressures for compliance or minimize perceptions of violation. Theorizing the relationship between norms’ content and states’ resistant rhetoric, I identify four types of rhetorical adaptation: norm disregard, norm avoidance, norm interpretation, and norm signaling. To probe the plausibility of these propositions, a case study of Turkey’s post-World War II narrative of the Armenian Genocide traces a sequence of rhetorical adaptations over the past six decades. Building on the case study, I then draw out generalizable insights into the uses and effects of rhetorical adaptation. Connecting theoretical concerns in political science with the interdisciplinary fields of genocide studies and memory studies, I delineate the ways in which actors instrumentally use norms and expand understandings of the forms and effects of so-called norm takers’ agency.

Multi-stakeholder initiatives, policy learning and institutionalization: the surprising failure of open government in Norway

“…This body of work draws significantly on a social constructivist approach to norm diffusion (Dobbin et al, 2007), and has proposed a number of comparable social mechanisms according to which government policies are distributed within the international arena, including learning, emulation, competition and coercion (Dobbin et al, 2007;Jörgens, 2009;. Of these, the coercive mechanism has strong corollaries in the IR literature focused on human rights compliance (Dixon, 2017;, while competition has primarily studied in regard to the diffusion of economic and trade policies (Dobbin et al, 2007). The mechanisms of learning and emulation resonate strongly with the ways in which public governance MSIs aim to leverage social incentives and peer pressure to facilitate a "race to the top," but have not been assessed in the context of public governance policy or norm promotion by MSIs.…”

Headwinds and tailwinds to the rights-based approach to development: A regime theory perspective

“…These forces for and against RBA will show how a norm that appears to be well-institutionalized and accepted is in fact still in a precarious situation: the fate of RBA remains unclear. It is not new to observe that some norms are better institutionalized and accepted by states than others (Dixon 2017;Buzas 2020), but the case here shows the ongoing process of institutionalization in the face of state resistance. When the gap is wide enough between what states say about the norm and what they actually do, we must question whether a norm exists in its most accurate sense.…”

Human rights abuses at the limits of the law: Legal instabilities and vulnerabilities in the ‘Global War on Terror’

“…22 As Jennifer Dixon notes, rhetorical adaptation strategies allow states to minimise accusations of norm violation. 23 Adding to these critiques, I suggest that modes of state engagement with legal rules other than straightforward law following and law breaking demand attention, particularly in the field of human rights. In doing so, I provide new insights into how states construct the plausible legality of human rights abuses in light of, not just in spite of law.…”