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Between Banyans and battle scenes: Liberal norms, contestation, and the limits of critique

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 December 2015

Jonas Wolff  and
Lisbeth Zimmermann
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Abstract

In studying the global spread and implementation of liberal norms, scholars have moved from linear notions of norm diffusion and promotion to an emphasis on norm contestation. Contestation by the supposed beneficiaries and addressees has taken centre stage in both research on the norms that underpin global governance and in studies on democracy promotion and liberal peacebuilding. While the impetus of this scholarship is normative – to overcome the taken-for-granted nature of liberal norms – the concept of contestation itself is mainly used with an analytical interest. Yet, as we show in this article, contestation also comes with – oftentimes implicit – normative connotations. Focusing on the seminal work of Milja Kurki, Oliver Richmond, Antje Wiener, and Amitav Acharya, we reconstruct these normative connotations. It turns out that the normative take on contestation is fairly conventional in all four approaches. Contestation is largely seen as a means to enable dialogue, as illustrated by Acharya’s metaphor of the Banyan tree. Fundamental conflicts over liberal norms (‘battle scenes’) are either not considered or seen as normatively undesirable. As a way forward, we propose a typology that enables scholars to empirically analyse contestation in its different expressions and suggest two strategies to normatively assess practices of contestation.

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Articles
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Review of International Studies , Volume 42 , Issue 3 , July 2016 , pp. 513 - 534
Copyright
© 2015 British International Studies Association 

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Footnotes

*

Previous versions of this article were presented in August 2014 at the Fourth Global International Studies Conference in Frankfurt/Germany and in March/April 2014 in a Workshop on ‘Pragmatic Peacebuilding’ at the ECPR Joint Sessions in Warsaw/Poland. We thank Amitav Acharya, Pol Bargués Pedreny, Lothar Brock, David Chandler, Katja Freistein, Piki Ish-Shalom, Beate Jahn, Chris Hobson, Milja Kurki, Anton Peez, Oliver Richmond, the participants of the ‘Pragmatic Peacebuilding’ Workshop and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. Lisbeth Zimmermann acknowledges the support by the DFG funded Cluster of Excellence ‘Normative Orders’ at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main.

References

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5 In this article, we do not use a fixed definition of liberal norms but relate more generally to the contested range of liberal conceptions of political order and (good) governance as used in contemporary international relations (the topic) and International Relations (the discipline) that include the set of norms associated with liberal models of democracy, rule of law, and human rights.

6 A liberal core of post-liberal peacebuilding research has, however, already been identified by postcolonial scholars. As Sabaratnam argues, post-liberal critiques are ‘trapped in a “paradox of liberalism”’. Sabaratnam, Meera, ‘Avatars of eurocentrism in the critique of the liberal peace’, Security Dialogue, 44:3 (2013), p. 270CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Chandler, David, ‘Resilience and the “everyday”: Beyond the paradox of “liberal peace”’, Review of International Studies, 41:1 (2015), pp. 38–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nadarajah, Suthaharan and Rampton, David, ‘The limits of hybridity and the crisis of liberal peace’, Review of International Studies, 41:1 (2015), pp. 49–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 This is part of Robert Cox’s famous definition of critical theory (as opposed to ‘problem-solving theory’). Cox, Robert W., ‘Social forces, states and world orders: Beyond International Relations theory’, Millennium, 10:2 (1981), p. 129CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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9 Acharya, ‘How ideas spread’; Acharya, Whose Ideas Matter?; Acharya, Amitav, ‘Norm subsidiarity and regional orders: Sovereignty, regionalism, and rule-making in the Third World’, International Studies Quarterly, 55:1 (2011), pp. 95–123CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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11 Wiener, ‘Contested compliance’; Wiener, The Invisible Constitution of Politics; Wiener, A Theory of Contestation.

12 See Krook and True, ‘Rethinking the life cycles of international norms’; Sandholtz, Wayne, ‘Dynamics of international norm change: Rules against wartime plunder’, European Journal of International Relations, 14:1 (2008), pp. 101–131CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Van Kersbergen, Kees and Verbeek, Bertjan, ‘The politics of international norms: Subsidiarity and the imperfect competence regime of the European Union’, European Journal of International Relations, 13:2 (2007), pp. 217–238CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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14 For overviews of this scholarship, see Mac Ginty, Roger (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Peacebuilding (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013)Google Scholar; Newman, Edward, Paris, Roland, and Richmond, Oliver P. (eds), New Perspectives on Liberal Peacebuilding (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Tadjbakhsh, Rethinking the Liberal Peace.

15 For overviews, see Bridoux and Kurki, Democracy Promotion; Hobson and Kurki, The Conceptual Politics of Democracy Promotion; Poppe and Wolff, ‘The normative challenge of interaction’.

16 See Mac Ginty and Richmond, ‘Myth or reality’; Mac Ginty and Richmond, ‘The local turn in peace building’; Richmond, Oliver P., The Transformation of Peace (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Richmond, Oliver P., ‘Patterns of peace’, Global Society, 20:4 (2006), pp. 367–394CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Richmond, ‘Resistance and the post-liberal peace’; Richmond, A Post-Liberal Peace; Richmond and Mitchell, ‘Peacebuilding and critical forms of agency’.

17 Richmond, , ‘Patterns of peace’, p. 393Google Scholar; see also Richmond, The Transformation of Peace.

18 Kurki, ‘Democracy and conceptual contestability’. See also Hobson and Kurki, The Conceptual Politics of Democracy Promotion; Kurki, Democratic Futures.

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21 See Acharya, Amitav, ‘Global International Relations (IR) and regional worlds’, International Studies Quarterly, 58:4 (2014), pp. 647–659CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Acharya, Amitav and Buzan, Barry (eds), Non-Western International Relations Theory: Perspectives on and beyond Asia (London: Routledge, 2010)Google Scholar.

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24 Wiener, , A Theory of Contestation, pp. 12Google Scholar, 1.

25 Ibid., p. 1.

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27 Kurki, ‘Democracy and conceptual contestability’. A second key move that characterises the research project at Aberystwyth is the deliberate turning away from a narrow, politico-institutional conception of democracy (and its contestation) towards a broader look at (contested) politico-economic models of democracy. See Bridoux and Kurki, Democracy Promotion; Kurki, ‘Democracy and conceptual contestability’; Kurki, ‘Human rights and democracy promotion’; Kurki, Milja, ‘Locating the normative within economic science: Towards the analysis of hidden discourses of democracy in international politics’, Journal of International Relations and Development, 16:1 (2013), pp. 55–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hobson and Kurki, The Conceptual Politics of Democracy Promotion.

28 Kurki, Democratic Futures.

29 Ibid., p. 12.

30 Ibid.

31 See Gallie, W. B., ‘Essentially contested concepts’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 56 (1956), pp. 167–198CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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33 Ibid., p. 4.

34 Ibid., p. 257, emphasis in original.

35 In this sense, Hobson and Kurki have explicitly put forward the ‘normative claim … that democracy promotion should be understood and practiced in a pluralist manner’. Hobson, Christopher and Kurki, Milja, ‘Conclusion: Reflections on a new approach in a new era of democracy promotion’, in Hobson and Kurki (eds), The Conceptual Politics of Democracy Promotion, p. 215Google Scholar, emphasis in original. See also Teivainen, Teivo, ‘The pedagogy of global development: the promotion of electoral democracy and the Latin Americanisation of Europe’, Third World Quarterly, 30:1 (2009), pp. 163–179CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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37 Kurki, Democratic Futures, p. 28.

38 Ibid., p. 227.

39 Ibid., p. 242.

40 Ibid., p. 29.

41 Ibid., p. 256.

42 Generally speaking, the question whether a given conception of political – or politico-economic – order is explicitly called ‘democratic’ can hardly be used as a normative standard for selecting legitimate alternatives to liberal democracy. In the cases of Schmitt and Stalin, it would be difficult to dispute that their conceptions of political order are undemocratic, but this does only show that there has to be some kind of normative criteria for demarcating the field of contestation of democracy.

43 Kurki, , Democratic Futures, p. 263Google Scholar.

44 Hobson and Kurki, ‘Conclusion’, p. 221.

45 On this general problematique and the difficulty of distinguishing ‘between genuine opposition to Western imperialism and the cynical abuse of pro-democracy rhetoric by authoritarian regimes’, see Morozov, Viatcheslav (ed.), Decentring the West: The Idea of Democracy and the Struggle for Hegemony (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013)Google Scholar. The quotation is from the introduction: Viatcheslav Morozov, ‘Introduction: Locating international democracy’, in Morozov, Decentring the West, p. 15.

46 Kurki, Democratic Futures, ch. 12.

47 Richmond, , ‘Patterns of peace’, p. 393Google Scholar. See also Richmond, The Transformation of Peace.

48 Richmond, A Post-Liberal Peace, p. 58.

49 Ibid., pp. 58–9.

50 Ibid., p. 16.

51 Ibid., p. 117.

52 Ibid., p. 149. Richmond explicitly connects his discussion of resistance to peacebuilding to the larger debate about civil resistance, which clearly has a positive connotation. See Richmond, , A Post-Liberal Peace, p. 119Google Scholar.

53 Ibid., p. 29.

54 Ibid., pp. 184–5.

55 Ibid., p. 144.

56 Ibid., p. 107.

57 Ibid., p. 112.

58 Ibid., p. 215.

59 Ibid., p. 112.

60 Ibid., p. 207. At the same time, Richmond talks about the ‘opportunity for empathic relations to emerge between the international and the everyday’, which may be embedded in ‘a balancing framework for, say, Habermasian discourse ethics’. Richmond, , A Post-Liberal Peace, pp. 133–134Google Scholar.

61 Ibid., p. 113.

62 Ibid., pp. 158–82.

63 Ibid., p. 145.

64 Ibid., p. 104, emphasis in original.

65 Ibid., p. 149. The normative benchmarks used by Richmond are correspondingly vague: ‘self-government, self-determination, empathy, care’; ‘self-government and self-determination’; or ‘participatory, empathetic, locally owned and self-sustaining, socially, politically, economically and environmentally speaking’. The overall aim is a version of peace that ‘would also provide justice and equity, and avoid violence both direct and structural’. Richmond, A Post-Liberal Peace, pp. 103, 105.

66 Ibid., p. 16.

67 Ibid., p. 15.

68 Ibid., p. 119.

69 Ibid., pp. 147–8.

70 Ibid., p. 132.

71 Ibid.

72 Wiener, A Theory of Contestation.

73 Wiener, ‘Contested compliance’; Wiener, ‘The dual quality of norms and governance beyond the state’; Wiener, The Invisible Constitution of Politics.

74 Wiener, A Theory of Contestation, p. 3. According to Tully’s multicultural democratic theory, contestation, also of a fundamental kind, is a basic principle of constitutional democracy shaped by diversity. Tully, James, ‘The unfreedom of the moderns in comparison to their ideals of constitutional democracy’, The Modern Law Review, 65:2 (2002), pp. 204–228CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

75 Wiener, ‘Contested compliance’.

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77 Wiener, , The Invisible Constitution of Politics, p. 4Google Scholar.

78 Ibid., p. 59.

79 Ibid., pp. 29–30; Wiener, Antje, ‘Normative baggage in international encounters: Contestation all the way’, in Oliver Kessler, Rodney Bruce Hall, Cecilia Lynch, and Nicholas Onuf (eds), On Rules, Politics and Knowledge: Friedrich Kratochwil, International Relations, and Domestic Affairs (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), p. 203Google Scholar.

80 Wiener, A Theory of Contestation.

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89 Wiener, , A Theory of Contestation, p. 30Google Scholar.

90 Wiener aims at ‘a procedure to account for and identify different understandings and to develop sustainable agreements’ on global norms. See A Theory of Contestation, p. 43.

91 Ibid., pp. 64–5.

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95 Wiener, A Theory of Contestation, p. 53, emphasis in the original.

96 As far as we can see, Wiener also does not specify her understanding of the term ‘conflict’. See Wiener, ‘Normative baggage in international encounters’; Wiener, A Theory of Contestation.

97 Acharya, , ‘How ideas spread’, p. 241Google Scholar; see also Acharya, , ‘Norm subsidiarity and regional orders’, p. 118Google Scholar.

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99 Acharya, ‘Norm subsidiarity and regional orders’.

100 Acharya, , ‘How ideas spread’, p. 251Google Scholar; Acharya, , ‘Norm subsidiarity and regional orders’, p. 95Google Scholar.

101 This metaphor was specifically proposed in the context of human rights norm diffusion. See Amitav Acharya, ‘From the Boomerang to the Banyan: the Diffusion of Human Rights Norms Reconsidered, paper prepared for the Conference on Human Rights Futures’, Columbia University, New York, 15 November 2013, made available to us by the author; Acharya, ‘Transnational civil society as agents of norm diffusion’, p. 108.

102 Keck, Margaret E. and Sikkink, Kathryn, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

103 Acharya, ‘Transnational civil society as agents of norm diffusion’, pp. 98–103. The same critique would apply also to the spiral model of international human rights diffusion, including its updated version. See Risse, Thomas, Ropp, Stephen C., and Sikkink, Kathryn (eds), The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Risse, Thomas, Ropp, Stephen C., and Sikkink, Kathryn (eds), The Persistent Power of Human Rights: From Commitment to Compliance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In the latter volume, the contribution by Jetschke and Liese explicitly aims at correcting problematic ‘implicit assumptions of the spiral model’ by taking into account ‘the notion of counter-frames to human rights norms and contestation’ (Jetschke and Liese, ‘The power of human rights a decade after’, p. 27). Yet, in fact, they do not consider any meaningful possibility of norm contestation but only two types of normative responses – ‘justifications’ and ‘excuses’ – that do not involve any questioning of the validity of the norms themselves (Jetschke and Liese, ‘The power of human rights a decade after’, p. 36).

104 Acharya, , ‘Transnational civil society as agents of norm diffusion’, pp. 104–108Google Scholar.

105 See also Acharya, ‘The R2P and norm diffusion’.

106 Acharya, ‘From the Boomerang to the Banyan’, p. 8.

107 Acharya, ‘Transnational civil society as agents of norm diffusion’; Acharya, ‘From the Boomerang to the Banyan’, p. 7.

108 Acharya, ‘From the Boomerang to the Banyan’, p. 21.

109 Ibid.; Acharya, ‘Transnational civil society as agents of norm diffusion’, p. 108.

110 Ibid., p. 108.

111 Acharya, ‘From the Boomerang to the Banyan’, p. 27.

112 Ibid.

113 Wiener does explicitly exclude ‘violent acts such as for example any form of war, terrorist acts or protest’ – but only because she defines contestation as a practice that ‘is always expressed through language’ (Wiener, A Theory of Contestation, p. 49). This, however, is in tension with the earlier statement that contestation ‘does not necessarily involve language’ (p. 1). In any case, contestation that includes a call for violent resistance would be part of the definition. The strong reference to Tully (see Tully, ‘The unfreedom of the moderns’) also suggests that Wiener does include contestation that questions norms and normative orders as such. Yet, again, such forms of contestation are not dealt with in her book.

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115 See Thiel, Thorsten, ‘Im Zweifel für den Zweifel: Theoretische Perspektiven auf die Legitimität von Kritik in der postnationalen Konstellation’ (unpublished manuscript, Frankfurt: Goethe University, 2014)Google Scholar.

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122 See, for example, Gill’s concept of the postmodern prince. Gill, Power and Resistance in the New World Order. See also Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Rancière, Disagreement.

123 Thiel, ‘Im Zweifel für den Zweifel’, p. 4; authors’ translation.

124 Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox; Mouffe, On the Political.

125 Daase, Christopher and Deitelhoff, Nicole, ‘Zur Rekonstruktion globaler Herrschaft aus dem Widerstand’, Internationale Dissidenz Working Paper 1 (2014)Google Scholar, available at: {http://dissidenz.net/workingpapers/wp1-2014-daase-deitelhoff.pdf} accessed 28 April 2014.

126 See Wiener, A Theory of Contestation, pp. 1, 49, fn. 113.

127 In a general sense, this is in line with what Boltanski calls a ‘sociology of critique’. Boltanski, Luc, On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation (Cambridge: Polity, 2011)Google Scholar.

128 Deitelhoff and Zimmermann, ‘Things we lost in the fire’.

129 In Wiener’s terminology, the former type of contestation concerns ‘standardised procedures’, the latter ‘fundamental norms’, while ‘organising principles’ occupy an intermediate position. Wiener, A Theory of Contestation, p. 3.

130 See Daase and Deitelhoff, ‘Zur Rekonstruktion globaler Herrschaft aus dem Widerstand’; Tarrow, Sidney, Power in Movement: Social movements and Contentious Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

131 The original quote reads: ‘There are no endogenous grounds in hegemony theory to differentiate between various hegemonies from the point of view of their emancipatory potential’. Morozov, ‘Introduction’, p. 10.

132 See Tully, John, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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135 The debates in philosophy centre on the question where such standards can be derived from distinguishing external, internal, and immanent critique. See, for example, Jaeggi, Rahel, ‘Towards an immanent critique of forms of life’, Raisons Politiques, 57:1 (2015), pp. 13–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

136 Butler, Judith, ‘What is critique? An essay on Foucault’s virtue’, in David Ingram (ed.), The Political: Readings in Continental Philosophy (London: Basil Blackwell, 2002), pp. 212–226Google Scholar; Mahon, Michael, ‘Michel Foucault’s archaeology, enlightenment, and critique’, Human Studies, 16 (1993), pp. 129–141CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Saar, Martin, ‘Genealogische Kritik’, in Rahel Jaeggi and Tilo Wesche (eds), Was ist Kritik? (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009), pp. 247–265Google Scholar.

137 Engelkamp, et al., ‘Office hours’; Sungju Park-Kang, ‘Utmost listening: Feminist IR as a foreign language’, Millennium, 39:3 (2011), pp. 861–877Google Scholar.

138 Danius, Sara, Jonsson, Stefan, and Chakravorty Spivak, Gayatri, ‘An interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’, boundary 2, 20:2 (1993), pp. 24–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

139 This overall guideline directly draws on David Couzens Hoy, who concludes his discussion of critical resistance by saying ‘that resistance that was unwilling to be both critical and self-critical would not even be worth attempting in the first place’. Hoy, Critical Resistance, p. 239.