In July 2016, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced a $250,000 cash prize for “disobedience,” to be awarded to individuals who challenge the norms, rules, or laws of society with the aim to promote positive change. Upon the announcement, the M.I.T. Media Lab Director Joi Ito made the following statement:
You don’t change the world by doing what you’re told. […] I’m not encouraging people to break the law or be disobedient just for the sake of being disobedient, but sometimes we have to go to first principles and consider whether the laws or rules are fair, and whether we should question them. […] I believe that being ‘disobedience robust’ is an essential element of any healthy democracy and of any open society that continues to self correct and innovate.1
As a researcher in the field of International Relations (IR), I have found this link between norm-violating conduct and social change fascinating. In our discipline, the issue of deviance, commonly understood as transgressive behavior in conflict with shared norms and rules, has not yet been properly explored and conceptualized. At the same time, the problem of change is arguably at the forefront of scholarly inquiry. In the decades following the end of the Second World War, the competition between the two ideological blocks made the world a relatively stable and predictable place. However, the traditional IR theories were not able to fully account for the changes in international politics following the unexpected disintegration of the Soviet Union and the events of 9/11. Today, there seems to be a prevailing feeling that we live in an age of turmoil, and the political scientists are constantly confronted with surprising events that challenge our earlier attempts to make sense of the world.
Many changes in the post-Cold War era are closely related to the problem of global governance and to the changing landscape of international norms and rules that guide behavior of states in the international system. As such, many IR scholars have been particularly interested in studying normative change that has been taking place with respect to the shared standards of appropriate behavior in world politics. Although the international norm dynamics has been a “topic of the day” for many years, and it seems to be more relevant today than ever before, the scholarly understanding of the link between norm violations and the changes in the normative structure of world politics is arguably still in its infancy.
In this book, my aim is to unpack the relationship between deviant behavior and normative change in international politics. Since the IR theory seems to be poorly equipped to address this particular problem, I decided to turn to the field of research that has been dealing with norms and transgressions for decades: sociology of deviance. In particular, I draw on the “interactionist perspective” of sociologists such as Erving Goffman, Howard S. Becker, Kai Erikson, and Edwin M. Schur, all of whom study deviance as a contingent, socially constructed phenomenon. In turn, I resorted to theoretical eclecticism and connected the interactionist perspective with the contemporary IR theories on norm contestation and change (e.g., Wiener 2008; Sandholtz 2007; Müller and Wunderlich 2013). Through this endeavor, I aim to join the ranks of “third generation constructivists” who draw on the symbolic interactionism in sociology to deal with the issues of identity, deviance, norms, and order in international politics (cf. Adler-Nissen 2016; Zarakol 2014; Kessler and Steele 2016).
Empirically, I focus on the phenomenon of “nuclear deviance” with respect to the norms that regulate the spread of nuclear weapons in the international system. The looming threat of nuclear war led to the gradual emergence of international regimes, institutions, practices, and initiatives that aim to halt the further proliferation of nuclear weapons among state and non-state actors. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) negotiated in the late 1960s has been the most prominent attempt to establish the key rules of the nonproliferation game.2 In IR scholarship, the violations of these rules have been mostly treated as a strictly negative phenomenon, hindering the efforts of states to sustain order in nuclear affairs. In my book, I instead develop an argument about the contestedness of “normal” and “deviant” conduct in nuclear politics and study the close relationship between the social (re)construction of nuclear deviance and the development of nuclear norms.
In this introductory chapter, I proceed as follows. First, I provide a brief commentary on some of the terminology I use throughout the book. Second, I introduce the interactionist perspective on deviance in sociology, which I later use to build my conceptual framework. Third, I review the existing IR attempts to employ interactionist theorizing in the field of international politics. Fourth, I provide a summary of my theoretical argument, drawing both on the interactionist perspective and the IR literature on norm contestation and dynamics. Fifth, I introduce the notion of the “nonproliferation game,” an empirical setting of my case studies. Sixth, I elaborate in detail on my research strategy in this book. Seventh, I discuss the scholarly contribution of my book. Eighth, I discuss limits and caveats of my approach. Finally, I provide a brief outline of each individual chapter and the overall plan of the book.
Notes on Terminology
Before I introduce the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of this book, I would like to provide the reader with a brief note on my use of some of the field-specific terminology. In particular, there are four specific terms that I use heavily throughout the book and likely deserve further elaboration: deviance, stigma, norms, and rules.
Deviance
I use the term deviance in its traditional sociological understanding of “certain deviations from social norms which encounter disapproval” (Clinard 1957, p. vii).3 In most sociological accounts, “deviance consists of norm violations” (Stafford and Scott 1986, p. 81). Nevertheless, Addrain Conyers and Thomas Calhoun propose that
deviance is a matter of degree – from behaviors or persons who attract strong condemnation from practically everyone, to behaviors or persons who attract weak condemnation from practically no one. The more serious the normative violation and the stronger the condemnation, the more likely it is that sociologists refer to it as deviance and the greater the likelihood that they have studied it. (Conyers and Calhoun 2015, p. 259)
The “deviant,” then, is a person (or, in the case of international politics, an actor with a distinct social identity, such as state) that violates the norms of the society (in the case of international politics, the international society). I also frequently use the term “deviant” as an adverb, to point to the norm-violating quality of a certain social category. The terms “transgression,” “transgressor,” and “transgressive” are used interchangeably with “deviance” and “deviant.” Often, I use quotation marks with “deviance” or “deviant” to stress the contingent and socially constructed nature of deviance. However, I do not use quotation marks when I speak of a deviant image, for example, as the notion of an “image” already implies that I deal with a societal reflection rather than an objective evaluation of the given object.
Stigma
The notion of stigma or stigmata originally comes from Ancient Greek, in which it was used as a word for a tattooed “mark” on a person’s face or other parts of the body (see Jones 1987). In modern times, the term has been widely used in sociology, psychology, and psychiatry for characteristics that make a person somehow excluded from the “normal” society. In Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, Erving Goffman describes stigma as a “deeply discrediting attribute,” an “undesired differentness from what we had anticipated” (Goffman 1963, pp. 12–14).
Although the problems of stigma and deviance are necessarily connected, the sociological literature mostly lacks the explicit conceptualization of the link between the two. Perhaps the closest link between stigma and deviance can be found in the work of Stafford and Scott (1986), who redefine stigma as “a characteristic of persons that is contrary to a norm of a social unit” (Stafford and Scott 1986, p. 80). Dijker and Koomen (2007) define stigmatization as “the process by which an individual’s or group’s character or identity is negatively responded to on the basis of the individual’s or group’s association with a past, imagined, or currently present deviant condition” (Dijker and Koomen 2007, p. 6, emphasis added). In my book, I follow up on these insights to treat stigmatization as a process that involves negotiations and contestations of deviant identities, and as a social practice that (re)constructs the limits of deviance and normality in society (see Chapter 2).
Norms vs. Rules
IR scholars mostly use the notion of a norm for behavior of states that is considered appropriate in international politics. Many scholars therefore understand norms as “collective expectations for the proper behavior of actors with a given identity” (Katzenstein 1996a, p. 5). Besides the intersubjective nature of norms and their constitutive relation to the social identity of individual actors, many IR constructivist authors also stress the “oughtness” of norms, insofar the norms provide the actors with guidelines on how they should act and speak in an international realm (cf. Jepperson et al. 1996; Towns 2012, p. 187). At the same time, norms as “standards of ‘appropriate’ or ‘proper’ behavior” also provide the possibility to evaluate the actor’s behavior in terms of its appropriateness for the given identity and specific situation (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998, p. 891).4 Scholars in social psychology frequently use the distinction between descriptive norms (i.e., what people “normally” do or say) and injunctive norms (i.e., prescriptions or proscriptions of what people should or should do) (Cialdini et al. 1991).
Among the problems I encountered during my research were the differing perspectives on the conceptual difference between norms and rules. For example, the international regime theory differentiates between norms and rules as different analytical categories. Whereas the norms are “standards of behavior defined in terms of rights and obligations,” the rules are “specific prescriptions or proscriptions for action” (Krasner 1982, p. 186; Zacher 1987; cf. Müller 1993). I frequently encountered similar suggestions in the IR literature that the “difference between rules and norms is that rules are written and codified (in a treaty or an agreement), whereas norms transcend rules because they have a social significance and thus provide boundaries which are flexible and open to interpretation” (Onderco 2012, fn. 3).
I find this distinction conceptually problematic and in conflict with the common usage of these terms in the sociology of deviance as well as much of the IR constructivist literature on norm dynamics. As I discuss and demonstrate in Chapters 3 and 4, even rules in written and codified international treaties and agreements are frequently to some extent ambiguous and subject to different interpretations among the relevant stakeholders (cf. Krook and True 2012; O’Mahoney 2014; Sandholtz 2008; Wiener 2008). At the same time, norms also often carry quite specific prescriptions and proscriptions for action (cf. Wiener 2007; Wunderlich 2013, p. 23). In many cases, the rule-norm distinction would be a truly daunting task, as many scholars observed in the empirical applications of international regime theory (cf. Hasenclever et al. 1996, p. 180).
Many scholars in IR constructivist scholarship and in sociology alike therefore use the two terms interchangeably. For example, Nicholas Onuf suggests that norms are just “rules by another name” (Onuf 2014, pp. 1–2). Similarly, Wayne Sandholtz draws on the standard practice in legal scholarship to suggest that rules “are the same thing as norms” (Sandholtz 2007, p. 5). Although Friedrich Kratochwil suggests that “all rules are norms, [but] not all norms exhibit rule-like characteristics,” he also admits that in his book, he uses the terms “more or less interchangeably” (Kratochwil 1989, p. 10). Much of the modern constructivist literature that I draw on in my theoretical framework also uses the term “rule” in places where the 1990s generation of IR constructivism would use the term “norm” (Sandholtz 2008; O’Mahoney 2014; Daase and Deitelhoff 2014).
In the sociology of deviance, scholars also mostly use both terms interchangeably. For example, Howard Becker argues that “social groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance” (Becker 1963, p. 9) and coins the widely used terms “rule enforcers” and “rule creators” that correspond to “norm enforcers” and “norm entrepreneurs” in constructivist IR literature.
In my book, I often avoid the terminological distinction by jointly referring to “rules and norms” as the normative base of behavior in social orders. When I use the terms separately, it is usually to highlight the more generality of the norm versus the specificity of the rule. However, when I need to differentiate the degree of specificity and formalization in a precise manner, I follow Antje Wiener’s vertical distinction among fundamental norms, organizing principles, and standardized procedures (see Wiener 2014 and Chapter 3 of this book).
Sociology of Deviance and the Interactionist Perspective
Whereas in this book I primarily aim to contribute to the broader discipline of IR, my theoretical framework is largely built on the (symbolic) interactionist approach to deviance and stigma in sociology. In this section, my aim is to introduce the interactionist perspective as an interactive, dynamic process of the social construction of deviance.5
The study of deviance is among the most prominent topics in modern sociology. In the early days of the discipline, a norm-violating behavior was primarily treated as a social pathology, a sort of “disease” contrasted with a “healthy” normal state in the medical analogy. The first systematic accounts of deviance as a complex phenomenon naturally occurring in all social orders appeared in the 1950s; US sociologist Edwin Lemert (1951) is sometimes hailed as one of the pioneers of the concept itself. The focus of the emerging sociology of deviance eventually split into two major research agendas: explanatory approaches and interactionist approaches.
Explanatory approaches have been primarily concerned with causal explanations for deviant behavior in society. They correspond to the positivist tradition in sociology, seeking to identify variables on the level of society that would explain why some individuals violate social norms—while others do not. Inherent to this appr...