Against International Relations Norms

Postcolonial Perspectives

Charlotte Epstein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138955981
• eBook ISBN: 9781317353652
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Globalización

This volume uses the concept of 'norms' to initiate a long overdue conversation between the constructivist and postcolonial scholarships on how to appraise the ordering processes of international politics. Drawing together insights from a broad range of scholars, it evaluates what it means to theorise international politics from a postcolonial perspective, understood not as a unified body of thought or a new '-ism' for IR, but as a 'situated perspective' offering ex-centred, post-Eurocentric sites for practices of situated critique.

Through in-depth engagements with the norms constructivist scholarship, the contributors expose the theoretical, epistemological and practical erasures that have been implicitly effected by the uncritical adoption of 'norms' as the dominant lens for analysing the ideational dynamics of international politics. They show how these are often the very erasures that sustained the workings of colonisation in the first place, whose uneven power relations are thereby further sustained by the study of international politics.

The volume makes the case for shifting from a static analysis of 'norms' to a dynamic and deeply historical understanding of the drawing of the initial line between the 'normal' and the 'abnormal' that served to exclude from focus the 'strange' and the unfamiliar that were necessarily brought into play in the encounters between the West and the rest of the world. A timely intervention, it will be of great interest to students and scholars of international relations, international relations theory and postcolonial scholarship.

1 The postcolonial perspective

Why we need to decolonize norms

Charlotte Epstein

The articles regrouped in this edited collection critique the concept of norms from a set of postcolonial and non-Western perspectives. The broader enterprise in which we are engaged is that of decolonizing the categories with which we study international politics, or the epistemology of International Relations (IR). In characterizing these contributions as ‘postcolonial’, I tread a fine line between drawing out their common undertaking and resisting the definitional gesture of nailing ‘postcolonialism’ as a unified theory or indeed a school of thought for the discipline. This is not merely because of IR’s ‘-ism’ fatigue; it goes to the heart of what is distinctive about the postcolonial.¹ Its epistemological purchase for IR, then, is that it foregrounds ex-centred, post-Westphalian places from where to envision the international system.² To say this is not only to say that it seeks to displace the starting point for theorizing, in order to undo the discipline’s Eurocentric and Anglo-American moorings. It is to say that it offers a perspective, in the strongest possible sense that location, and the particular, matter centrally to the type of envisioning that is sought once these moorings are loosened. The postcolonial provides what Donna Haraway (1988) first termed ‘partial perspectives’, which are deeply embedded ‘situated knowledges’, and from which the international system may begin to look rather different. In this introductory chapter I begin by charting the common enterprise of decolonizing norms in which we are engaged. I then consider what ‘situated perspectives’ in IR might look like in a second part, before introducing the individual contributions in the third part of this essay.

Decolonizing the discipline

The study of international norms provides a targeted focus for ‘decolonising the mind’ to study international politics, to play off the expression of the Kenyan activist and writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who, in an influential 1986 essay, which was also a farewell to the English language, showed that political independence was but a milestone, rather than the arrival point, of decolonization. The task would remain incomplete so long as it maintained intact, indeed helped reproduce, the languages and the epistemologies that had underwritten the colonial project in the first place, and whose prolonged hegemonies were not just a quaint legacy, but its enduring expression.³ Two decades on, in an essay published in a seminal collection by Branwen Gruffydd Jones that set out to Decolonize International Relations, Julian Saurin (2006, 26) plainly observed ‘IR has inherited a colonizer’s model of the world’. The decolonizing undertaking has continued apace, yielding one of the discipline’s most productive fields of research; and one that in the context of a globalizing IR, is sustained by the scholarly desires – from its teachers and students alike – to move the study of international politics beyond its ‘Euro’ (Hobson 2012) or ‘Anglo-centric’ (Vucetic 2011) frames of reference.⁴ This collection contributes to the decolonizing enterprise, by showing the specific ways in which this colonizer’s model has been perpetuated in the study of international norms.

Why norms?

Norms have become part of IR’s established tool-kit for analysing the behaviour of international actors that is driven, not merely by a concern for self-interest maximisation, but by a ‘logic of appropriateness’ (March and Olsen 1998). Norms, or, in Martha Finnemore and Katheryn Sikkink’s (1998, 894) classic definition, ‘shared ideas, expectations and beliefs about appropriate behaviour’ are ‘what gives the world structure, order and stability’. They oil the workings of international cooperation. In the history of the discipline, norms – along with their conceptual counterpart, identity – have played a crucial role in moving IR beyond its narrow focus upon material understandings of power and interest-maximising behaviours. Norms are a hallmark of ‘conventional constructivism’ (Hopf 1998, Wiener 2004), and the driving concept of its highly successful empirical research programme, now into its third decade.⁵

Constructivism’s merit is to have opened up the ideational dimension of one of the discipline’s oldest questions: what are the ordering processes undergirding the anarchic international system? Or to phrase it differently, why, despite the absence of a centralised authority to enforce them, do international actors consistently appear to observe common, implicit or explicit rules – the behaviour, that is, that makes international cooperation possible?⁶ Whether practically (they sustain cooperation) or for their theoretical contribution (bringing ideational and social dynamics into sight), norms, then, would appear to be good things for international politics. This may explain an enduring bias in the constructivist empirical research programme towards ‘good’ international norms (such as human rights or anti-whaling), notwithstanding a recent corrective by way of attention to some of the less felicitous international norms, such as the bearing of arms (see for example Bob 2012). Even the more critical strands of norms analysis, which have apprehended these as not merely benignly diffusing, but rather as operating specific exclusions in the international system (see notably Adler-Nissen 2014, Zarakol 2011, and indeed Epstein 2008), have fallen short of considering what these might look like from a postcolonial perspective. And yet the ideational mechanisms regulating this system have been a driving interest of postcolonial research for a long time.⁷

Indeed, concerns with ‘global order’ were increasingly salient in the nineteenth century colonial project, notably as it was articulated by John Stuart Mill (Bell 2010). La mission civilisatrice (the civilizing mission), to use the consecrated term of the French colonial state, held a dual ordering function, internal and external. Internally, it aimed to bring the languages, mores and norms of civilisation to ‘barbarian’ populations (Lecour-Grandmaison 2005). Externally, it played a key role in the emergence of international law in the nineteenth century (Anghie 2005). Moreover, the twin processes of colonization and decolonization have constituted crucial historical shapers of our contemporary international system, in which postcolonial states comprise a majority. These have been key drivers of the ‘diffusion’, to use constructivism’s term, of the very institution that yielded its unit, the state, and the norms of sovereignty it is bound with, which the contributions by Sarah Phillips, Anthea Vogl, Rebecca Adler-Nissen and Ulrik Pram Gad engage with directly from postcolonial perspectives. Insofar, then, as they seek to apprehend the normative matrices underwriting the behaviour of international actors, or the nomoi of the international system, as I have called them elsewhere (Epstein 2012c), constructivist and postcolonial scholars would appear to be on the same page.

Constructivism’s shortcoming, however, is to have neglected the power relations running through these normative matrices, and the specific exclusions they enact and enable – power that is still understood in its immaterial, relational dimensions. This line of critique was developed from the late 1990s onwards by the ‘critical constructivist’ and ‘poststructuralist’ quarters of the discipline; here I use the two terms interchangeably insofar as they share a common understanding of what constitutes the duty of critique. It is to ‘denaturalise the taken-for-granted’ social constructs that were built on and further entrench unequal power relations, to invoke the introductory essay by Jutta Weldes, Mark Laffey, Hugh Gusterson and Raymond Duvall (1999) to a seminal collection in the emergence of a postcolonial IR. It brought together a group of critical constructivist scholars who all turned to postcolonial empirics, and all eschewed the concept of norms to apprehend them. Norms are the taken-for-granted of IR that the contributors to this volume aim to denaturalise.

Orders of knowledge-power: the epistemological duty of critique

Our critical task is to understand how norms constitute powerful ordering mechanisms of international politics that are enabled and sustained by particular forms of knowledge. In this duty of critique, the ethical commitment differs from that at work in norms constructivism in ways that Naeem Inayatullah and David Blaney further expound in Chapter 2. The role of the normative consists not in determining the ‘ought’ that political actors or ‘norm entrepreneurs’ should orientate themselves upon in order to make the world a better place (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998). In that scenario, the normative is a guide to political practice or praxis. Here, instead, the duty of critique is necessarily epistemological, insofar as practices are always sustained by specific forms of knowledge (see also Shilliam 2014). To engage with the normative at the level of practices, as norms constructivism does, is therefore to leave untouched the orders of knowledge that sustain them.

Returning power relations to the analysis makes this no longer viable, or at least sufficient, as an ethical commitment. Or to put it differently, apprehending the normative merely at the level of praxis is not enough, once one recognises that orders of practice are regulated by epistemological orders, which in turn are always suffused with power. ‘Knowledge-power’ (savoir-pouvoir) is the term Michel Foucault coined to capture this constitutive and mutually reinforcing relation between forms of knowledge and powerful normative orders. Re-examining the epistemological categories that both sustain practices, on the one hand, and scholarly analysis, on the other, then, becomes the duty of critique. The contributors to this volume seek to explore the specific forms of knowledge-power that have become institutionalised as a result of conventional constructivism’s success in adding norms to IR’s established tool-kit. What is it about the concept itself, its underlying logic, that can account for the erasure of the workings of power in the international system?

Norming and re-norming the study of international politics

Restoring power relations to the ideational analysis of norms beckons two crucial referents for beginning to think about international norms differently, Michel Foucault and Judith Butler. Norms are a key modality of the operation of discipline, which constitutes Foucault’s historic contribution to understanding the ideational workings of power. In his 1975–1978 lectures on power, Foucault (2003, 38–39) draws a first distinction between the power of laws and that of norms. Both hold a prescriptive power, over what is allowed and what is right, respectively. Laws, however, are encountered as external limits; they shape behaviour from without, through the threat of sanctions. Norms, on the other hand, require no such threat. They operate as ‘natural rules’ (Foucault 2003, 38). They work political actors from within, as a set of internalised prescriptions that are experienced as ‘chosen’.⁸ This naturalness explains a key source of the power of norms, which is this taken-for-granted, unquestioned quality they command. From an IR optic, which is grounded in a topological distinction between the ‘inside’ of the state and the ‘outside’ of the international (Walker 1989), the latter is where the law ceases to apply. Norms, on the other hand, fully folded as they are into actors’ behaviour, are not contained in the state. They can travel or indeed diffuse, to use the language of norms constructivism.

Foucault (2009, 57) then draws an additional distinction between ‘normation’ and ‘normalization’. ‘Normation’ helps to locate precisely where the prescriptive power of norms lies. The ‘primacy of the norm’ (Foucault 2009, 57) in relation to the normal is that it draws the original boundary between acts that are deemed appropriate – suiting constructivism’s logic of appropriateness – and those that are not. ‘The determination and the identification of the normal and the abnormal becomes possible in relation to this posited norm’ (Foucault 2009, 57). ‘Normalization’ constitutes the battery of means then deployed to obtain that deviant actors toe the line:

Disciplinary normalization consists first of all in positing a model, an optimal model that is constructed in terms of a certain result and the operation of disciplinary normalization consists in trying to get people, movements and actions to conform to this model, the normal being precisely what can confirm to this norm.

(Foucault 2007, 57)

Building on Foucault’s insights, Judith (1997) Butler has shown how individual desires, far from being innate or natural, are regulated by deeply entrenched normative matrices, such as the heterosexual nomos (see also Butler 2006).⁹ Key to both Butler and Foucault’s setting into relief the disciplinary effects of norms is the genealogical approach. Genealogies unsettle the fixity and naturalness of norms, by drawing out how they constitute specific historical constructs, pertaining to a particular set of social relations, rather than containing universal truths about human behaviour.

‘Normation’, ‘normalization’ and ‘nomos’ all offer important concepts for denaturalising norms. Indeed, constructivism’s analytical logic consists in starting from an established international norm, one that can be shown to have a tangible effect upon the behaviour of international actors.¹⁰ For example, and to draw on a few that the contributors engage with, human rights (Chowdhury), racial equality (Smith), anti-whaling (my own). The norm is then tracked as it is ‘diffused’ through the international system, generally by ‘norm entrepreneurs’, and then as it is ‘internalized’ by local actors who are more less successfully ‘socialized’ into it, to run through the gamut of constructivist terms, which are analysed in detail in Charmaine Chua’s and my chapters.

Instead, these concepts provide new starting points for apprehending the power that inheres in international norms, the extent to which they constitute the actors of international politics, and regulate the possibilities for acting ‘appropriately’. They shift the focus from treating a norm as ‘given’ to considering its initial constitution, so as to lay bare the dynamics that underwrite it; to account for the particular form that a norm takes; and to account for how it authorizes certain forms of behaviour and not others. Let us call ‘norming’ the processes by which the rules of appropriateness in the international system are settled, and ‘re-norming’, their transformation. These are intensely powerful processes, as international activists or ‘norm entrepreneurs’ intimately know. They constitute precisely the loci of power that non-state actors, who hold none of the traditional currencies of international power (military or economic might), have invested in and with which they have carved out their roles as international actors, a dynamic I have documented with the first successful case of global environmental activism, whaling (Epstein 2005, 2008). An example of ‘re-norming’ is the shift in the West’s apprehension of whaling as an unquestioned economic activity, to an uncivilised, unacceptable practice.¹¹

Apprehending the ‘problem-space’ of liberal norms constructivism

In an essay entitled ‘Criticism after Postcoloniality’, David Scott (1999) has developed the notion of ‘problem-spaces’ as an epistemological tool for appraisin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Biographies
• 1 The postcolonial perspective: why we need to decolonize norms
• 2 Constructivism and the normative: dangerous liaisons?
• 3 Colonial rationalities, postcolonial subjectivities, and the international
• 4 Civilising norms and political authority in Africa: reflections drawn from psychoanalysis
• 5 Stop telling us how to behave: socialization or infantilization?
• 6 Against localization: rethinking compliance and antagonism in norm dynamics
• 7 International norms in postcolonial time
• 8 On the therapeutic uses of racism in other countries
• 9 The norm of state-monopolised violence from a Yemeni perspective
• 10 Sovereign relations? Australia’s ‘off-shoring’ of asylum seekers on Nauru in historical perspective
• 11 In the post-colonial waiting room: how overseas countries and territories play games with the norm of sovereignty
• 12 Postcolonial colonialism?: the case of Turkey
• Index