Norm Contestation

“'It bothers me when [the CIA] say[s] there were seven guys, so they must all be militants,' the [Obama administration] official said” (Becker and Shane 2012).

“They want us to be rabbits in their war… But I’m a peaceful man and I don’t want to fight. The government is against us – and Isis and Jabhat al-Nusra want to kill us.” Syrian refugee in Serbia (Kingsley 2015).

Efforts to mitigate the harms of war-fighting have a long history in many societies around the world. A common element in these diverse protective efforts is the idea that those uninvolved in war should be shielded from its ill effects, an idea captured in the civilian immunity norm. One of the norm’s prescriptions, the distinction principle, obligates belligerents to distinguish between permissible and impermissible targets and to refrain from intentionally targeting the latter group with lethal force. Civilians fall within this protected group. However, the civilian immunity norm is not absolute: custom and international law do permit soldiers to kill civilians who threaten them. Yet the norm directs actors to temper its exceptions with its primary goal of protecting the maximum number of civilians from the horrors of war.

As declared by the International Court of Justice, the non-intervention norm is one of the most foundational norms in international relations today (International Court of Justice 1969). The non-intervention norm governs a variety of inter-state behavior, from official public statements to the use of force, which can intrude on a state’s domestic affairs. It is widely accepted among the global community of states. This chapter focuses specifically on how the norm regulates the use of inter-state force and its exceptions. One exception in particular permits states to use force against another state for humanitarian purposes. This exception has yet to be codified in international law, yet, historically and currently, state practice suggests a general acceptance that the parameters of the non-intervention norm allow for these humanitarian exceptions. However, much as is the case with the civilian immunity norm, ambiguity has plagued the non-intervention norm, impeding intersubjective agreement and generating contestation. This chapter illustrates these dynamics by first providing a historical overview of the norm and its humanitarian exceptions as well as the ambiguity contained within them. It then discusses dominant explanations for non-compliance with the norm, highlighting their assumption of intersubjective agreement among normative actors. The chapter continues with a discussion of how the logics of appropriateness, practicality, and contestedness within the norm contestation framework utilized here apply to the non-intervention norm and humanitarian intervention. This discussion is then followed by an exploration of how the norm contestation framework contributes to our understanding of the global discussion on Russia’s actions in Crimea as captured by the global media and official statements. It does so by illustrating how despite its long-held embrace of the norm and the idea of humanitarian intervention, Russia’s attempts to justify the Crimean intervention revealed an understanding of the norm which greatly differed from those held by the norm enforcer. The chapter continues by arguing that Russia’s willingness to maintain a commitment to this particular normative understanding was more indicative of the logic of appropriateness informed by the logic of contestedness and the logic of practicality than the logic of consequences.

This study demonstrates how a norm contestation framework can provide useful insights to norm-related behavior. In doing so, it argues that this framework can supplement explanations offered by other frameworks or step in when their theoretical mechanisms unsatisfactorily help us understand empirical puzzles. The norm contestation framework can offer this assistance because it appreciates norms’ dynamism. Rather than viewing norms as “things” whose content remains unchanged, norm contestation’s use of the logics of appropriateness, contestedness, and practicality enables it to notice how different social contexts contribute to variations in how actors interpret norms, even long-established, foundational norms. As Antje Wiener (2004: 190), puts it, “analysis of social practices in context provide additional leverage when it comes to explaining cases that otherwise seem puzzling…” These variations in interpretations are then employed to help explain differences in norm-related behavior.