Since World War II, efforts to establish global governance have intensified and increasingly involved all countries in the world. International agreements , organisations and ideas have sought to create widely accepted practices for solving problems in almost all spheres of life. Substantial work has concentrated on the development of collaborative procedures to ensure that states get together partly to solve problems that cannot be addressed individually, but also so that powerful countries can promote their particular interests. Over the years, many actors have also sought to push the international community to adopt decisions about long-term goals involving social, political and economic change. These attempts address how societies should be organised, sometimes being grounded in a humanitarian agenda, sometimes in dominant political and economic thinking. In a globalised and diversified world, with multiple close connections between countries and different powerful views on global and local development, the task of establishing international normative priorities has become as contested and conflict-ridden as it has become important. Global governance is by no means obvious, and today has become a source of ambivalence because of the relationship between outdated international institutions established during the Cold War, fortified nation states pursuing particularistic interests and technocratic issue-based attempts to reach international agreement .
The study of how global norms influence policies and practices around the world has emerged as a principal field of scholarship across international studies in recent decades (Checkel 1999; Risse et al. 1999; Acharya 2004; Risse and Sikkink 1999). Particularly under the heading of norm diffusion, researchers have analysed how norms travel and the mechanisms facilitate this. A major idea in this approach is that global norms spread relatively unchanged across contexts and that they gradually diffuse across the world once a certain threshold of norm acceptance is achieved (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998). In response to this, under the heading of translation, others have argued that norms are continually changed when they travel to new contexts, subjected to interpretation and addressed differently in different places (Czarniawska and Joerges 1996; Acharya 2004; Zwingel 2012). Both traditions have provided significant contributions to analysing how global norms influence social interaction in concrete contexts.
Within the study of global norms , the broad umbrella of âgender equalityâ has become a central empirical arena for exploring how such norms are engaged with, potentially move and influence policies and practices, informing broader theoretical and conceptual debates with fresh thinking (see Zwingel 2016; van der Vleuten et al. 2014b; Levitt and Merry 2009). Gender equality is a contested and increasingly challenged issue that is now coming under pressure from numerous sides, from the strong anti-feminist discourses and anti-abortion development policies of the current US administration to similar threats to womenâs and girlsâ sexual and reproductive health and rights from religious and conservative groups in Europe, Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Its central place in human relations has made it an important concern in international cooperation, with a large number of conventions and declarations seeking to establish norms for addressing different issues of gender equality and inequality . 1 Despite there being little agreement on its meaning and form, its ideal core is often associated with aims of achieving equal political, economic, personal and social rights for women, as well as improving relations between women and men. The ambition of fundamentally challenging patriarchal social structures and discourses has always evoked different responses in the form of hostility, resistance, indifference or deeply felt support. As obvious and necessary as the norms seem to many, as alarming and destructive do they appear in the eyes of others who see their promotion of radical changes as eroding traditional structures of power, culture and religion in society. Due to the multiple meanings associated with the term, as a norm gender equality has sometimes been described as an âempty signifier that takes as many meanings as the variety of visions and debates on the issue allow them to takeâ (Verloo and Lombardo 2007: 22). However, it could also be seen as an âoverloaded signifierâ (Juul Petersen 2018) incorporating a range of different and sometimes even contradictory understandings, implying that they can and should be made meaningful to different audiences. Despite their somewhat diffuse nature, global norms on gender equality are unavoidable in social interaction. Particular actors have to address them whether they like them or not because they have acquired significant legitimacy, sometimes by way of approval in international agreements (Towns 2010). Hence, much policy-making and social change in regional, national and local contexts relates to global norms, sometimes straightforwardly turning them into a negotiated reality, sometimes, though more and more rarely, carefully avoiding them altogether, and sometimes developing initiatives in critical opposition to them. Accordingly, gender equality provides a compelling case for the study of global norms in international politics.
This book analyses the institutional and often highly political processes stemming from engagement with global norms of gender equality by individual and social actors, whether they are local, national, regional or transnational in nature. It brings together scholars who, each in their own way, question and challenge the notion that norms travel or are diffused across and among contexts, organisations or individuals. Instead they accentuate the muddy, multi-actor, multi-level processes of interaction that occur whenever norms are used, manipulated, bent or betrayed by actors. This is what we call a situated approach to norm engagement, which focuses attention on the different situations and contexts, each providing a different set of constraints and opportunities for action. Central issues taken up in the book include: (i) identification of the actors involved in the constitution of, or exclusion from, processes of norm engagement ; (ii) the ways in which norms of gender equality are produced, interpreted, debated and transformed; and (iii) the circumstances, positions and power relations influencing the processes and outcome of engagement with gender norms . These issues are explored in a variety of contexts, exhibiting how gender equality provides a vantage point for studying both concrete engagement with norms and, more theoretically, abstract conceptions of their influence in different contexts. The outcome is to pose a significant challenge to some of the taken-for-granted or dominant ideas on how norms incite change and how they matter in both policy and practice.
In this introduction, we outline the situated approach to norm engagement , being inspired by the bookâs chapters, while at the same time, providing a framework stimulated by and in dialogue with them. The aim of the book is to explore how actors and organisations engage with and ascribe meanings to gender equality norms and what role they play in different situations and contexts. The situated approach underlines how the intersubjective nature of norms means that these are addressed, reproduced or changed in social interaction and cannot be understood as existing outside such processes. Norms do not have any inherent energy that transports them across boundaries. Rather, actors relate to them in different situations, whether intentionally or not, and whether through discourses or practices. In doing so, they may be influenced by the norms, but may also influence them in return and change their meaning. This also suggests that global norms are but one element that actors consider in a given situation when they develop new policies and practices, often âmuddling throughâ in contingent ways as they seek to derive meaning out of the situations in which they find themselves.
The remainder of this introduction consists of five parts. First, we discuss the conceptualisation of norms, a far from straightforward matter. We seek to redirect attention from regulatory and constitutive norms to prescriptive norms , like gender equality , and proposes a definition of norms which allows for their contested nature. Secondly, we turn to gender equality and how it finds expression in global norms . Here we argue that there is no consistent global set of norms of gender equality, although we believe that they share certain characteristics and that their prescriptive power lies in a shared ability to reject gender-based discrimination . Thirdly, we confront dominant conceptualisations of norm âmovementâ as they are found in the bodies of literature on diffusion and translation. Given the contested nature of many prescriptive norms , we find âtravelâ metaphors of little use in describing the role of global norms in national and local contexts . This also disregards the multi-directional nature of norm engagement where actors seek to promote particular interpretations globally as well as locally. Fourthly, we outline the situated approach to engagement with norms. This approach emphasises actors and their interpretations of the situations in which they engage with global norms. As organisations constitute a primary site of engagement with global gender equality norms , we highlight particular organisational issues that significantly shape the interpretation of norms. Finally, we describe how the different chapters of the book take up central issues related to the situated approach to norm engagement .
The Conceptualisation of Norms
The basis for the emerging interest in norms in international studies in the 1980s and particularly the 1990s was partly a critique of the material focus in mainstream thinking about the environment of international relations (Katzenstein 1996). It was also partly a matter of the problems in understanding how the international mirrored the national while emphasising the lack of a sovereign, a situation sometimes described as the âanarchyâ of international society (Kratochwil 1989). The focus on the material aspects of the domestic and international environment that influences state interests and policies was viewed as insufficient and even inaccurate by scholars emphasising cultural and institutional issues. However, since the latter were developed in response to the former, they were to some extent pressed into identifying tangible elements of the environment if they were to be taken seriously. In this sense, the historica...