Texts from Hendriks class + study questions

Question 1

Lantis’ & Wunderlich’s text

Answer 1

They propose a three- dimensional framework that analyzes individual norms, norm clusters, and broader normative constellations to explain how norms gain meaning and resilience. Contestation can strengthen norms rather than signal their failure.
- Contestation can strengthen norms
- Three-dimensional framework
o Individual norms
o Norm clusters
o Meta-governance norms (human rights)
- Norm collisions

Question 2

What is a norm collision? (Lantis’ & Wunderlich’s text)

Answer 2

We adopt the definition of norm collisions as “instances in which actors claim that two or more norms provide conflicting or incompatible expectations about appropriate behavior in a specific situation”

Question 3

What are meta-governance norms? (Lantis’ & Wunderlich’s text)

Answer 3

Our approach to meta-normative structures recognizes dimensionality and interwovenness at work in norm dynamics: Within broader normative constellations (macro), distinct meta-norms affect the working of other individual norms (micro) and norm clusters (meso) and lend legitimacy to the overall normative structure. Meta-governance architectures are constellations that develop over time through crystalized growth both between and among different norms and norm clusters, through creative recombinations of preexisting normative meanings.
They are both constitutive of the international institutional order as they define what should be governed and who should be in charge, and they are procedural in that they relate to how global challenges should be addressed.

Question 4

What is a norm cluster? (Lantis’ & Wunderlich’s text)

Answer 4

• According to Lantis and Wunderlich norms emerge into preexisting normative structures consisting of different norms, rules, and social practices.
• Those norms that diffuse most readily and gain legitimacy in the system more quickly are fostered in complementary normative “neighborhoods” where their principles are more closely linked to similar other norms.
• norms that are embedded in larger “norm clusters” are more resilient when faced with contestation than isolated norm

Question 5

What is an individual norm? (Lantis’ & Wunderlich’s text)

Answer 5

Individual norms serve as the first dimension of Lantis and Wunderlich’s model, recognized as the primary structural component of world politics.
- that they can be developed over time by committed actors who share common principles and a certain reading of said norm, that they may be assembled from the bottom-up or the top-down, and that they help to define discursive patterns

Question 6

Wiener’s text

Answer 6

She conceptualizes contestation as a social practice of objection that is essential for legitimacy in culturally diverse global governance systems. The article shows how unequal access to contestation creates legitimacy gaps and reshapes power over norm meaning and ownership.
- Contestation (Reactive and proactive contestation)
- Fundamental norms, organizing principle, Standardized procedure
- Cycle of contestation
o Formal validation, social recognition, cultural validation
- Contestation is essential for legitimacy

Question 7

What is the concept of contestedness? (Wiener’s text)

Answer 7

The second key concept, contestedness, draws on the constant practice of border crossing and the related latent contestation of norms by individual agents. Individually held normative baggage will always spark conflict. Notably, contestations are always expected in international inter-cultural encounters; that is, they occur at all layers of society. For when actors cross international boundaries and leave their social groups behind, normative meanings are no longer shared, but become individual baggage.

Question 8

What is reactive and proactive contestation? (Wiener’s text)

Answer 8

• Norms are always contested
  o Norms are inherently contested and are subject to interpretation and re-interepretation across contexts
• Reactive contestation
  o An objection to a norm or a specific instance of its implementation.
  o Actors accept the norm in principle
  But contest how, when, or to whom it applies
  o “We accept non-refoulement, but this person is not a refugee.”
• Proactive contestation
  o A critical and purposeful engagement with a norm to question its underlying legitimacy or purpose.

Question 9

Pegram’s text

Answer 9

Pegram examines the expanding but fragmented architecture of global human rights governance and the persistent gap between norms and compliance. He introduces orchestration as a key governance mechanism through which international actors influence states indirectly via intermediaries such as national institutions and civil society.

Question 10

What are the three conditions of orchestration? (Pegram’s text)

Answer 10

• It occurs when three conditions are met:
  (1) the orchestrator seeks to influence the behaviour of the target indirectly via intermediaries, and
  (2) the orchestrator does not exercise control over the intermediary, which, in turn,
  (3) cannot compel compliance of the target.
• Example: The UN orchestrates human rights compliance by supporting NGOs that monitor and report violations, even though those NGOs cannot legally compel states to comply.

Question 11

Mahoney’s text

Answer 11

Mahoney argues that liberalism requires a comprehensive moral foundation for human rights rather than pragmatic, political, or purely legal justifications. He contends that human rights must function as non-negotiable constraints on political power grounded in moral facts about human dignity, autonomy, and equality. Without such a foundation, liberal defenses of human rights risk undermining their universality and authority.

• Critiques pragmatic (Ignatieff), political (Rawls), and legal (Habermas) justifications of rights.
• Ignatieff: conflict avoidance and conflict management rather than morality or justice is the rationale for human rights.
• Rawls: The political argument holds that human rights should be justified as part of a political conception of liberalism capable of serving as the focus of an overlapping consensus among diverse moral doctrines. Although political in form, this justification remains moral, grounding human rights in shared ideas of fairness and reasonableness rather than in any single comprehensive moral theory.
• Habermas: Habermas claims human rights are justified in terms of the political autonomy they enable; human rights are justified because they make possible democratic political and lawmaking practices

The moral argument maintains that the universalism of human rights norms follows from the fact that persons, whoever and wherever they are, are entitled to protections from moral harms defined by a conception of fundamental interests. On this view, human rights claims are moral propositions whose scope is universal and whose justification is provided by true moral beliefs about persons and their interests.

Question 12

Donnelly’s text

Answer 12

Donnelly argues that international human rights are historically contingent and socially constructed norms that emerged after World War II. He shows how human rights function as enforceable entitlements primarily against states, which remain both the main violators and protectors of rights.

Question 13

People’s and Vaughan-Williams’ text

Answer 13

They argue that security is an inherently contested concept shaped by political assumptions about threats, referent objects, and values
- Security is political, constructed, and changeable.

Introduces key concepts: referent object, broadening, deepening, and normativity.
- Broadening: Move away from a narrow focus on the military sector to analysis of issues in other sectors
- deepening: the state is not the only referent object
- Referent object: That which is to be secured.

The Welsh, Copenhagen, and Paris School

Question 14

What is the Welsh, Copenhagen, and Paris school?

Answer 14

• The Welsh School
  o At the University of Wales, Aberystwyth (now Aberystwyth University), Ken Booth and Richard Wyn Jones had self-consciously developed a brand of ‘Critical Security Studies’ that challenged the definition of security purely in terms of military threats to the state, and instead linked the study of security to the expansive goal of human emancipation
• The Copenhagen School
  o Wæver, along with Barry Buzan and other colleagues linked to the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute (COPRI) put forward the concept of ‘securitization’, focusing on how the invocation of the concept of security affects particular issues
• The Paris School
  o in Paris, scholars working at Science Po (or the Paris Institute of Political Studies) and connected to the journal Cultures et Conflits, were seen to be developing a more sociological approach that concentrated on the conduct of everyday security practices ranging from police to border control.

Question 15

Bloxhams’ text

Answer 15

• Contestation
• Critique of the genocide convention: There is no moral difference between Israel’s killing X number of Palestinians pursuant to a specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza “as such,” in the language of the UN Convention, and Israel’s holding Palestinian life in such contempt as to kill the same number instrumentally to other goals
• Morally speaking, I do not care about the dolus specialis (“special intent”) element of the UN genocide definition. As it happens, that element constitutes the point at which commonplace and legal understandings of genocide so often part company, and it could be the only distinguishing factor between two instances of mass atrocity that are identical in intended practical consequences.

Question 16

Blakely’s and Price’s text

Answer 16

Blakeley and Price argue that torture did not end with the CIA’s RDI program but continues through indefinite detention, secrecy, medical abuse, and unfair trials at Guantánamo Bay.

The article concludes that this system is a deliberate, institutionalized regime sustained by multiple U.S. agencies and enabled by a lack of accountability. International Relations (IR) literature tends to view the RDI programme as an aberration, and its closure an indicator of the restoration of the anti-torture norm which the argue is not the case.

Question 17

Pratt’s text

Answer 17

Pratt explains how the U.S. transformed rather than abolished the prohibition on assassination by redefining targeted killing as lawful self-defense. He shows how legal reinterpretation, drone technology, and new bureaucratic alliances worked together to normalize and routinize killing as a standard counterterrorism practice. The result is a fully institutionalized targeted killing regime that preserves the language of prohibition while emptying it of substance.
- The practice of targeted killings (Targeted killing regime)
- Norm death, norm dissociation, and norm transformation

Question 18

What is norm death, Norm dissociation, and norm transformation regarding targeted killings? (Pratt’s text)

Answer 18

• “Norm death” holds that the prohibition has disappeared, either because the historical circumstances that established and reinforced it no longer obtain, or because it has been eroded by the deliberate efforts of pro-assassination “norm entrepreneurs.” Norm death proceeds through escalating non-compliance, driven by inadequate incentives to self-regulate or strategic benefits to transgression, psychological pressures to reinterpret norms until they no longer regulate in any meaningful sense, and the presence of alternative new norms that can inspire moral defection.
• “Norm dissociation” holds that a prohibition on assassination either did not actually exist, except perhaps as an unenforced formality, or (more plausibly) that US officials did not care whether or not they violated it from the start. Dissociation (as I term it) is another form of non-compliance. It is a product of organizational culture oriented toward violations, the absence of specific domestic resonance for a particular norm, or ineffective norm “localization”, such that a norm nominally exists but is weakly institutionalized in practice. The end result is that a norm may exist in name or in law but without extension.
• “norm transformation” holds that a prohibition on assassination did exist in ways that mattered for US officials but changed such that targeted killing ceased to be assassination in their perspective. This emerges out of a change in how rather than whether to comply — one that may be driven by discursive contestation but also by technological or bureaucratic imperatives.

Question 19

Bode’s text

Answer 19

Bode argues that international norms on the use of force are increasingly shaped by everyday technological practices rather than formal legal change. She shows how drones, automation, and data-processing systems normalize targeted killing and reduced human control, quietly shifting what is considered acceptable. These practices create a growing gap between international law and state behavior, weakening legal constraints on the use of force.
- The international normative order extends beyond formal international law.
- A minimal human-control norm is emerging through practice rather than law.

The international legal and normative order and their relationship
- Contested areas between these orders (Contesting Use-of-Force Norms through Technological Practices)
- Social norms: intersubjective understandings of ‘appropriateness’

Question 20

What does Bode mean with intersubjective understandings of ‘appropriateness’?

Answer 20

new (legal and social) norms may become part of the international normative order not only from the top-down, that is after having been institutionalized into soft or hard international law, but also from the bottom-up, that is resulting from practices, understood as patterned ways of doing things in social contexts
- I define such social norms as intersubjective understandings of ‘appropriateness’.

Question 21

What is the international legal and normative order? And what is their relationship? (Bode text)

Answer 21

• The international normative order predates the international legal order and is constituted by social norms.
• In the international normative order, actors therefore negotiate, develop, and shape interpretations and understandings of international law in practices. But the international normative order goes beyond this by also featuring social norms that have no immediate connection to international law and may not only be communicated publicly via deliberative practices but also tacitly or at sites not accessible to the public via non-deliberative practices
• The international legal order captures all institutionalised standards of international law, such as treaties, protocols, declarations, or resolutions, as well as established customary international law. By contrast, the international normative order contains the full range of accepted interpretations and practices in relation to such standards, as well as other, intersubjective (and potentially functional or procedural) understandings of appropriateness that are not (necessarily) attached to international law.

Question 22

Contested areas between the international normative and legal order

Answer 22

In cases where practices performed in the realm of the international normative order do not trigger an evolving agreement, there will be mismatches between the legal and normative orders in the form of contested areas. These contested areas describe deliberative and non-deliberative practices that interpret and/or justify the use of force but are at least partly outside the scope of established, intersubjective understandings of appropriateness
- The presence of such contested areas in between the international legal and the international normative order matters because they decrease their congruence with each other. If there is a high, overall congruence between the legal and normative orders, this arguably creates a certain stability of expectations for state behaviour.

Question 23

Debrix and Barder’s text

Answer 23

Debrix and Barder argue that modern power no longer governs through centralized sovereign fear but through dispersed, everyday practices of governmentality. Fear is produced and managed across society to regulate life, behavior, and risk rather than to threaten death directly. Individuals internalize and reproduce fear through self-monitoring, making fear a self-sustaining mechanism of biopolitical control.
- Biopower and biopower’s function in relation to fear
- How fear functions as mechanism of self-regulation that maintains social order
- Fear is dispersed across institutions rather than centralized in the sovereign.

Question 24

What is biopower? (Debrix and Barder’s text + De Larrinaga’s and Doucet’s text)

Answer 24

• Biopower, as theorized by Michel Foucault, refers to modern forms of power that regulate and manage human life through disciplinary control of bodies and regulatory control of populations, rather than through sovereign coercion alone and simply threatening death or enforcing obedience through law.
• Biopower is power exercised over life, bodies, and populations.

Question 25

What is biopower’s function in relation to fear?

Answer 25

- Biopower shifts the focus from the right to take life to the effort to "foster life or disallow it to the point of death". Power aims to establish control, supervision, or enhancement of the social body (the population in its entirety) through rational mechanisms of measurement, regulation, and preservation of life - In essence, the article argues that fear has been weaponized beyond the state's central command, becoming a capillarized, pervasive mechanism of self-regulation that maintains social order not by eliminating danger, but by normalizing insecurity and ensuring that populations remain perpetually mobilized against the threat of losing their "normal" life

Question 26

Sander’s text

Answer 26

Sanders argues that states commit human rights abuses by exploiting legal ambiguities rather than openly breaking the law, a strategy he calls “plausible legality.” Through reinterpretations of torture, detention, and targeted killing rules, governments make violations appear lawful while preserving legitimacy - Law contains ambiguities that allow strategic reinterpretation.

Question 27

Zehfuss’ and Vaughan-Williams’ text

Answer 27

Zehfuss and Vaughan-Williams argue that migration is governed through a dominant “security-space” imaginary that naturalizes borders, territorial belonging, and exclusion. - The system of thought underpinning the “security-space” imaginary requires and normalizes discrimination against those produced as not in their “proper place,” those construed as “from elsewhere” - Migrants are governed through time: waiting, delays, temporariness, and suspended futures.

Question 28

Léonard’s and Kraunert’s text (Security through association)

Answer 28

Léonard and Kaunert argue that asylum-seekers in the EU were securitized indirectly by being associated with terrorism rather than through direct political speech acts. However, one can conceive that it might be possible for an issue that cannot easily be securitized directly because of its intrinsic characteristics to be securitized indirectly through its association with another issue that has become widely accepted as a security issue. The ‘Paris School’—have argued that issues can also be securitized through practices. As argued by Bigo (2000: 194), ‘[i]t is possible to securitise certain problems without speech or discourse and the military and the police have known that for a long time. The practical work, discipline and expertise are as important as all forms of discourse’. - Security screening, databases, and hotspot procedures institutionalized suspicion. - Frontex, Europol, and national agencies reinforced risk-based governance.

Question 29

Léonard’s and Kraunert’s text (Frontex)

Answer 29

This article argues that migration securitisation in the EU occurs primarily through everyday practices rather than explicit political rhetoric. Léonard and Kaunert show how Frontex’s expanding operations, technologies, and cooperation with military and law enforcement actors frame migration as a security risk. Over time, these practices have transformed Frontex into a central security actor and entrenched securitisation within EU migration governance. - The securitisation framework used in this article draws upon the Copenhagen School’s work, but alters it in two significant ways. First of all, it focuses on security practices, rather than discourse, and conceptualises security as a continuum, rather than equating it with survival.

Question 30

How does Leonard and Kraunert conceptualize securitization?

Answer 30

The securitisation framework used in this article draws upon the Copenhagen School’s work, but alters it in two significant ways. First of all, it focuses on security practices, rather than discourse, and conceptualises security as a continuum, rather than equating it with survival. - From that perspective, the ideas of survival and existential threats are not abandoned, but are placed at the end of a continuum. - security issues can be conceptualised as ‘[moving] on a continuum from normalcy to worrisome/troublesome to risk and existential threat – and conversely, from threat to risk and back to normalcy’. 1) This conceptualisation is in line with the understanding of securitisation as a spiralling process, which is at the heart of this special issue and which refers to the idea that the intensity of a phenomenon can increase or decrease in a dramatic fashion and over a short period of time.

Question 31

Niemann’s and Zaun’s text

Answer 31

They show how migration control has become intertwined with foreign policy, security, development aid, and cooperation with third countries through externalisation strategies. - Externalisation strategy: managing migration beyond EU territory We argue that most policies employ ‘remote control’ – broadly defined as a ‘set of practices, physical structures, and institutions whose goal is [to] control the mobility of individuals while they are outside the territory of their intended destination state’ - Thus, policies either engage third parties in the enforcement of EU borders, usually outside of European territory, or they focus on the incentives of migrants and third countries.

Question 32

Dembour’s text

Answer 32

Dembour argues that human rights theory is divided into four ideal-typical schools—natural, deliberative, protest, and discourse—each offering a distinct understanding of what human rights are and how they function. - Natural school: rights are inherent to human beings; law embodies pre-existing universal rights. - Deliberative school: rights are political values created through democratic agreement; universality is future-oriented. - Protest school: rights emerge from social struggle; they are unfinished and continuously contested. - Discourse school: rights exist as political language; universality is seen as ideological.

Question 33

Shah’s and Sivakumaran’s text

Answer 33

Shah and Sivakumaran analyze how states invoke international human rights law within the Universal Periodic Review process. They show that states adopt a flexible, practice-based understanding of human rights law, frequently blurring distinctions between binding and non- binding sources. The UPR not only monitors compliance but actively reshapes what counts as human rights law through political negotiation.

Question 34

Koskenniemi text

Answer 34

The argument is that the meaning of legal texts, such as treaties, conventions, and customary law, is not fixed or strongly determinate. Instead, the interpretation of these texts is always open to multiple, often conflicting readings, and the ultimate choice among them depends on factors beyond the text itself, especially political interests - Koskenniemi argues that international law is inherently political because its rules are indeterminate and can justify opposing outcomes.

Question 35

Moreno-Lax’ text

Answer 35

Moreno-Lax argues that the EU uses humanitarian language to legitimize restrictive and securitized border practices. She shows how “rescue” is redefined as interdiction or prevention of movement, while substantive protection rights such as asylum and non- refoulement are sidelined - instead of enhancing reception capacities, the EU chose to reinforce border controls. - Although several of the intercepted migrants ‘indicated an intention to apply for international protection’ (Frontex, 2011c), according to direct eyewitnesses, ‘people [were] removed … within one or two days of arrival’ (Amnesty International, 2011), making it implausible they were given ‘a real and adequate opportunity’ to request asylum and/or appeal expulsion decisions in line with fair processing standards. - Instead, the ‘humanitarianization’ of border-sea entrenches the management of pain and pity as part of the EU external frontiers architecture. And with Mediterranean crossings becoming a matter of life and death (Albahari, 2006, 2015), irregular crossers are not only classed as threats, but also as victims to be ‘saved’. “‘Borderization’ of the Mediterranean: One that objectifies migrants as threats (‘a risk’) to border security and as victims (‘at risk’) of smuggling/trafficking” (Moreno-Lax 2018, p. 120) - Interdiction as a "win-win-situation" for the EU: protecting HR by avoiding risky passage and protecting the EU by keeping migrants out of its territory

Question 36

De Larrinaga’s and Doucet’s text

Answer 36

De Larrinaga & Doucet (2008) argue that human security discourse functions as a dual mechanism of sovereign power and biopower, making populations governable while legitimizing exceptional interventions purportedly aimed at protecting human life — thus reinforcing rather than undermining global security structures. - Human security (referent object) - Biopolitics and biopower - The narrower concept of human security centres around (re)defining norms surrounding the legitimacy of the international community’s right to intervention. o Although this can be taken as a deferral to the norms of territorial inviolability, there is a continued adherence to an understanding of sovereignty that is qualified in line with the state’s biopolitical functions - codification of sovereignty in biopolitical terms - human security can be seen as having laid the conceptual terrain for a form of human subjectivity amenable to the exercise of global sovereign rule.

Question 37

What is human security? (De Larrinaga’s and Doucet’s text)

Answer 37

Human security is a people-centred approach to security that focuses on protecting individuals from critical and pervasive threats to their lives, livelihoods, and dignity, emphasizing freedom from fear, freedom from want, and respect for human rights. (referent object)