Questions about norm diffusion in world politics are not simply about whether and how ideas matter, but also which and whose ideas matter. Constructivist scholarship on norms tends to focus on “hard” cases of moral transformation in which “good” global norms prevail over the “bad” local beliefs and practices. But many local beliefs are themselves part of a legitimate normative order, which conditions the acceptance of foreign norms. Going beyond an existential notion of congruence, this article proposes a dynamic explanation of norm diffusion that describes how local agents reconstruct foreign norms to ensure the norms fit with the agents' cognitive priors and identities. Congruence building thus becomes key to acceptance. Localization, not wholesale acceptance or rejection, settles most cases of normative contestation. Comparing the impact of two transnational norms on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), this article shows that the variation in the norms' acceptance, indicated by the changes they produced in the goals and institutional apparatuses of the regional group, could be explained by the differential ability of local agents to reconstruct the norms to ensure a better fit with prior local norms, and the potential of the localized norm to enhance the appeal of some of their prior beliefs and institutions.I thank Peter Katzenstein, Jack Snyder, Chris Reus-Smit, Brian Job, Paul Evans, Iain Johnston, David Capie, Helen Nesadurai, Jeffrey Checkel, Kwa Chong Guan, Khong Yuen Foong, Anthony Milner, John Hobson, Etel Solingen, Michael Barnett, Richard Price, Martha Finnemore, and Frank Schimmelfennig for their comments on various earlier drafts of the article. This article is a revised version of a draft prepared for the American Political Science Association annual convention, San Francisco, 29 August–2 September 2001. Seminars on the article were offered at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University, in April 2001; the Modern Asia Seminar Series at Harvard University's Asia Center, in May 2001; the Department of International Relations, Australian National University, in September 2001; and the Institute of International Relations, University of British Columbia, in April 2002. I thank these institutions for their lively seminars offering invaluable feedback. I gratefully acknowledge valuable research assistance provided by Tan Ban Seng, Deborah Lee, and Karyn Wang at the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies. I am also grateful to Harvard University Asia Centre and the Kennedy School's Asia Pacific Policy Program for fellowships to facilitate my research during 2000–2001.

http://www.rochelleterman.com/ir/sites/default/files/acharya%202004.pdf

How Ideas Spread: Whose Norms Matter? Norm Localization and Institutional Change in Asian Regionalism

The Silent Language

International peacebuilding can improve the prospects that a civil war will be resolved. Although peacebuilding strategies must be designed to address particular conflicts, broad parameters that fit most conflicts can be identified. Strategies should address the local roots of hostility, the local capacities for change, and the (net) specific degree of international commitment available to assist sustainable peace. One can conceive of these as the three dimensions of a triangle whose area is the “political space”—or effective capacity—for building peace. We test these propositions with an extensive data set of 124 post–World War II civil wars and find that multilateral, United Nations peace operations make a positive difference. UN peacekeeping is positively correlated with democratization processes after civil war, and multilateral enforcement operations are usually successful in ending the violence. Our study provides broad guidelines for designing the appropriate peacebuilding strategy, given the mix of hostility, local capacities, and international capacities.

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International Peacebuilding: A Theoretical and Quantitative Analysis

1. Introduction 2. Fear, interest and honor 3. The spirit and its expression 4. The ancient world 5. Medieval Europe 6. From Sun King to Revolution 7. Imperialism and World War I 8. World War II 9. Hitler to Bush and beyond 10. General findings and conclusions.

/pdf/a-cultural-theory-of-international-relations-4bpcaeiy8z.pdf

A Cultural Theory of International Relations

The dramatic events that marked the end of the Cold War and the subsequent early end of the twentieth century require the United States to reconsider its national security policy. What are U.S. interests and objectives? What are the threats to those interests and objectives? What are the appropriate strategic responses to those threats? What principles should guide the development of U.S. policy and strategy? In short, what should be the new grand strategy of the United States? Four grand strategies, relatively discrete and coherent arguments about the U.S. role in the world, now compete in our public discourse. They may be termed neo-isolationism; selective engagement; cooperative security; and primacy (see Table 1 for a summary presentation of the four alternative visions). Below, we describe each of these four strategies in its purest form; we borrow liberally from the academics, government ofacials, journalists, and policy analysts who have contributed to this debate, but on issues where others have kept silent, or been inconsistent, we impose consistency in the interest of clarity. Our purpose is not advocacy; it is transparency. We hope to sharpen the public debate, not settle it. We then offer our characterization and critique of the evolving grand strategy of the Clinton administration, an uneasy amalgam of selective engagement, cooperative security, and primacy. Finally, we speculate on what might cause the United States to make a clearer grand strategy choice. The state of the U.S. economy, the national anances, and persistent social problems largely drove foreign and defense policy out of the 1992 presidential race. The 1996 campaign was little different. The arst months of the arst Clinton administration were characterized by indirection, and later by a nearly singleminded focus on economic issues. Security matters were dealt with sequentially and incrementally; no obvious grand scheme emerged until Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs Anthony Lake proposed in Septem-

http://www.comw.org/pda/14dec/fulltext/97posen.pdf

Competing Visions for U.S. Grand Strategy

Never again! the world has vowed time and again since the Holocaust. Yet genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other mass atrocity crimes continue to shock our consciences --from the killing fields of Cambodia to the machetes of Rwanda to the agony of Darfur. Gareth Evans has grappled with these issues firsthand. As Australian foreign minister, he was a key broker of the United Nations peace plan for Cambodia. As president of the International Crisis Group, he now works on the prevention and resolution of scores of conflicts and crises worldwide. The primary architect of and leading authority on the Responsibility to Protect (""R2P""), he shows here how this new international norm can once and for all prevent a return to the killing fields. The Responsibility to Protect captures a simple and powerful idea. The primary responsibility for protecting its own people from mass atrocity crimes lies with the state itself. State sovereignty implies responsibility, not a license to kill. But when a state is unwilling or unable to halt or avert such crimes, the wider international community then has a collective responsibility to take whatever action is necessary. R2P emphasizes preventive action above all. That includes assistance for states struggling to contain potential crises and for effective rebuilding after a crisis or conflict to tackle its underlying causes. R2P's primary tools are persuasion and support, not military or other coercion. But sometimes it is right to fight: faced with another Rwanda, the world cannot just stand by. R2P was unanimously adopted by the UN General Assembly at the 2005 World Summit. But many misunderstandings persist about its scope and limits. And much remains to be done to solidify political support and to build institutional capacity. Evans shows, compellingly, how big a break R2P represents from the past, and how, with its acceptance in principle and effective application in practice, the promise of "Never again!" can at last become a reality.

The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and For All

Part 1 Dynamics: the changing international environment the evolution of an independent foreign policy elements in foreign policy making the politics of foreign policy the practice of foreign policy. Part 2 Issues: the search for global security security in the Asia Pacific region trade and investment imperatives development assistance responsibilities the new internationalist agenda. Part 3 Relationships: the South Pacific South-East Asia Indo-China North-East Asia South Asia and the Indian Ocean the Middle East and Africa Europe the Americas. Part 4 Challenges: Australia's role in the world of the 1990s.

Australia's Foreign Relations: In the World of the 1990s

Part 1 Defining the issues peace and security in the 1990s and beyond - problems and responses the United Nations and the international community. Part 2 Peace building strategies, international regimes in-country peace building. Part 3 Dispute resolution strategies preventive diplomacy preventive deployment. Part 4 Conflict resolution strategies: peace making peace keeping. Part 5 Intervention strategies sanctions peace enforcement. Part 6 Proposals for action co-operating for peace - the challenge improving structures, processes and resources.

Cooperating for Peace: The Global Agenda for the 1990s and Beyond

The international community has conspicuously failed to maintain the peace since the end of the Cold War. Hopes that the United Nations might play a much more pervasive and effective security role--bolstered by the success of peace enforcement against Iraq and the large peacekeeping operations in Namibia and Cambodia--were brought rapidly back to earth by apparent U.N. impotence to intervene quickly or usefully in Bosnia, Somalia, or Rwanda. More can certainly be done by the international community to prevent and resolve interstate conflict , but the currently bigger problem of intrastate conflict has been scarcely tackled at all, either conceptually or practically.

Cooperative Security and Intra State Conflict

As cochair (Evans) and member (Thakur) of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), and principal authors of its 2001 report The Responsibility to Protect (R2P),1 we read Robert Pape’s article with great interest—but also with growing surprise and ultimately considerable disappointment.2 Intervention can be studied as an analytical concept or as a political project, and Pape’s article clearly falls into the latter category. His purpose is to advance his so-called pragmatic standard of humanitarian intervention against the standard of the genocide convention (which, in his view, sets the bar much too high) and R2P (which he thinks is loose and permissive, setting the bar much too low). For an article proposing to advance humanitarian intervention as a political project, however, it is remarkably disconnected from political reality.3 Pape completely overlooks the emergence of R2P over the last decade as the normative instrument of choice for converting shocked international conscience about mass atrocity crimes into decisive collective action. His forty-page article devotes just two pages to R2P, focusing entirely on its original artiulation in the ICISS report and totally ignoring its subsequent intellectual and political evolution. “[S]ome policy advocates and scholars,” he states, “have argued for the adoption of the ‘responsibility to protect’ standard” (pp. 50–51). Pardon? R2P was actually adopted by the United Nations General Assembly, sitting as the 2005 World Summit, the largest gathering of the world’s heads of state and government ever convened,4 and subsequently in multiple Correspondence: The Responsibility to Protect

Gareth Evans

Papers

The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and For All

Australia's Foreign Relations: In the World of the 1990s

Cooperating for Peace: The Global Agenda for the 1990s and Beyond

Cooperative Security and Intra State Conflict

Correspondence: Humanitarian Intervention and the Responsibility to Protect