Norms have never been absent from the study of international politics, but the sweeping “ideational turn” in the 1980s and 1990s brought them back as a central theoretical concern in the field. Much theorizing about norms has focused on how they create social structure, standards of appropriateness, and stability in international politics. Recent empirical research on norms, in contrast, has examined their role in creating political change, but change processes have been less well-theorized. We induce from this research a variety of theoretical arguments and testable hypotheses about the role of norms in political change. We argue that norms evolve in a three-stage “life cycle” of emergence, “norm cascades,” and internalization, and that each stage is governed by different motives, mechanisms, and behavioral logics. We also highlight the rational and strategic nature of many social construction processes and argue that theoretical progress will only be made by placing attention on the connections between norms and rationality rather than by opposing the two.

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International Norm Dynamics and Political Change

Keywords: a Vocabulary of Culture and Society

The history of international political orders is written in terms of continuity and change in domestic and international political relations. As a step toward understanding such continuity and change, we explore some ideas drawn from an institutional perspective. An institutional perspective is characterized in terms of two grand issues that divide students of international relations and other organized systems. The first issue concerns the basic logic of action by which human behavior is shaped. On the one side are those who see action as driven by a logic of anticipated consequences and prior preferences. On the other side are those who see action as driven by a logic of appropriateness and a sense of identity. The second issue concerns the efficiency of history. On the one side are those who see history as efficient in the sense that it follows a course leading to a unique equilibrium dictated by exogenously determined interests, identities, and resources. On the other side are those who see history as inefficient in the sense that it follows a meandering, path-dependent course distinguished by multiple equilibria and endogenous transformations of interests, identities, and resources. We argue that the tendency of students of international political order to emphasize efficient histories and consequential bases for action leads them to underestimate the significance of rule- and identity-based action and inefficient histories. We illustrate such an institutional perspective by considering some features of the coevolution of politics and institutions, particularly the ways in which engagement in political activities affects the definition and elaboration of political identities and the development of competence in politics and the capabilities of political institutions.

/pdf/the-institutional-dynamics-of-international-political-orders-4v1onuni6t.pdf

The Institutional Dynamics of International Political Orders

International Relations scholars have vigorous theories to explain why international organizations (IOs) are created, but they have paid little attention to IO behavior and whether IOs actually do what their creators intend. This blind spot flows logically from the economic theories of organization that have dominated the study of international institutions and regimes. To recover the agency and autonomy of IOs, we offer a constructivist approach. Building on Max Weber's well-known analysis of bureaucracy, we argue that IOs are much more powerful than even neoliberals have argued, and that the same characteristics of bureaucracy that make IOs powerful can also make them prone to dysfunctional behavior. IOs are powerful because, like all bureaucracies, they make rules, and, in so doing, they create social knowledge. IOs deploy this knowledge in ways that define shared international tasks, create new categories of actors, form new interests for actors, and transfer new models of political organization around the world. However, the same normative valuation on impersonal rules that defines bureaucracies and makes them powerful in modern life can also make them unresponsive to their environments, obsessed with their own rules at the expense of primary missions, and ultimately produce inefficient and self-defeating behavior. Sociological and constructivist approaches thus allow us to expand the research agenda beyond IO creation and to ask important questions about the consequences of global bureaucratization and the effects of IOs in world politics.

/pdf/the-politics-power-and-pathologies-of-international-2pwcle5zda.pdf

The Politics, Power, and Pathologies of International Organizations

Social constructivism in international relations has come into its own during the past decade, not only as a metatheoretical critique of currently dominant neo-utilitarian approaches (neo-realism and neoliberal institutionalism) but increasingly in the form of detailed empirical findings and theoretical insights. Constructivism addresses many of the same issues addressed by neo-utilitarianism, though from a different vantage and, therefore, with different effect. It also concerns itself with issues that neo-utilitarianism treats by assumption, discounts, ignores, or simply cannot apprehend within its characteristic ontology and/or epistemology. The constructivist project has sought to open up the relatively narrow theoretical confines of conventional approaches—by pushing them back to problematize the interests and identities of actors; deeper to incorporate the intersubjective bases of social action and social order; and into the dimensions of space and time to establish international structure as contingent practice, constraining social action but also being (re)created and, therefore, potentially transformed by it.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2601360.pdf

What Makes the World Hang Together? Neo-utilitarianism and the Social Constructivist Challenge

Activist efforts within and across societies are a proper object of study and only by including them in transnational activist research can one render an accurate understanding of transnational activist groups and, by extension, of world politics. This chapter focuses on activist society-oriented activities and demonstrates that activist organizations are not simply transnational pressure groups, but rather are political actors in their own right. The main argument is that the best way to think about transnational activist societal efforts is through the concept of “world civic politics.” One can appreciate the idea of world civic politics by drawing an analogy between activist efforts at the domestic and international levels. When activists work to change conditions without directly pressuring states, their activities take place in the civil dimension of world collective life or what is sometimes called global civil society. Amnesty International, Friends of the Earth, Oxfam, and Greenpeace target governments and try to change state behavior to further their aims.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0043887100016415

Politics Beyond the State: Environmental Activism and World Civic Politics

Environmental activism and world civic politics

The Earth System Governance project is a global research alliance that explores novel, effective governance mechanisms to cope with the current transitions in the biogeochemical systems of the planet. A decade after its inception, this article offers an overview of the project's new research framework (which is built upon a review of existing earth system governance research), the goal of which is to continue to stimulate a pluralistic, vibrant and relevant research community. This framework is composed of contextual conditions (transformations, inequality, Anthropocene and diversity), which capture what is being observed empirically, and five sets of research lenses (architecture and agency, democracy and power, justice and allocation, anticipation and imagination, and adaptiveness and reflexivity). Ultimately the goal is to guide and inspire the systematic study of how societies prepare for accelerated climate change and wider earth system change, as well as policy responses.

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New directions in earth system governance research

Environmentalists have always worked to protect the wildness of nature but now must find a new direction. We have so tamed, colonized, and contaminated the natural world that safeguarding it from humans is no longer an option. Humanity's imprint is now everywhere and all efforts to "preserve" nature require extensive human intervention. At the same time, we are repeatedly told that there is no such thing as nature itself -- only our own conceptions of it. One person's endangered species is another's dinner or source of income. In Living Through the End of Nature, Paul Wapner probes the meaning of environmentalism in a postnature age. Wapner argues that we can neither go back to a preindustrial Elysium nor forward to a technological utopia. He proposes a third way that takes seriously the breached boundary between humans and nature and charts a co-evolutionary path in which environmentalists exploit the tension between naturalism and mastery to build a more sustainable, ecologically vibrant, and socially just world. Beautifully written and thoughtfully argued, Living Through the End of Nature provides a powerful vision for environmentalism's future

Living Through the End of Nature: The Future of American Environmentalism

Environmentalists engage many causes. They work on behalf human rights, poverty alleviation, and democracy as well as endangered species, a stable climate, and clean air, water, and soil. Amidst these diverse efforts, environmentalists maintain a fundamental commitment to nature. They see their job, to one degree or another, as standing up for the conservation, preservation, and sustainability of the nonhuman world. This dimension of environmentalism finds its roots in the West, especially Britain and the United States, 1 but has since become part of almost every social expression of environmental concern. Today, even the most human-centered environmental organizations—those focused on, for example, environmental justice, sustainable development, and industrial ecology— concentrate on nature insofar as they see a healthy natural world as a prerequisite for human well-being or a medium through which injustices are perpetrated. Indeed, since environmentalism’s beginnings in the nineteenth century, when people began worrying about industrialization despoiling rural and wild landscapes, to contemporary efforts to address climate change, freshwater scarcity, and loss of biological diversity, a central strand of environmentalism has prized the natural world and worked to protect it. The point of departure for this article is that the assumption behind the movement’s defense of nature is no longer valid and that continuing to subscribe to it compromises the promise of global environmentalism. The effort to defend or otherwise protect nature from humans assumes a distinction between the two. It supposes a domain that is essentially “human” and another that is fundamentally “nature.” Over the past few decades, ecological events and human understandings have proven this supposition erroneous. Today, humans draw so many resources from deep within and across the earth, and emit such incalculable amounts of waste into the air, water, and soil that, as McKibben famously

Paul Wapner

Papers

Politics Beyond the State: Environmental Activism and World Civic Politics

Environmental activism and world civic politics

New directions in earth system governance research

Living Through the End of Nature: The Future of American Environmentalism

The Changing Nature of Nature: Environmental Politics in the Anthropocene