International Norms in Conflict: Contestation and Norm Robustness

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The optimism of the 1990s that, after the end of the block confrontation, fundamental norms would diffuse globally has been unsettled in recent years. Even fundamental human rights have witnessed severe contestation. Time and again conflict erupts around international norms such as the torture ban or the international responsibility to protect. At the same time, it remains contested in existing research how such conflicts around norms affect the robustness of norms, if they contribute to their weakening or to their strengthening. The liberal-constructivist norm research has, initially, not analyzed conflicts around norms; latest research in this branch conceptualizes norm contestation as a sign of norm weakening. In contrast, critical research on (legal) norms assigns contestation a normative power of its own which strengthens norms by their continuous actualization. It remains an open question, however, how much conflict a norm can bear while still being perceived as a shared normative expectation by their addresses. We analyze when contestation leads to norm weakening or to norm strengthening. We tackle this question with a comparative design of four case studies of highly contested norms and two cases of norms that have completely eroded. Utilizing insights fom the discourse theory of law and normativity (Deitelhoff 2006; Günther 1988; Habermas 1992), we analyze (1) the hypothesis that norm robustness depends on the type of contestation, thus, if contestation concerns the dimension of application or the dimension of validity. (2) We will also investigate which factors advance a specific form of contestation and, linked to this, a change of norm robustness.