Fig 2 - uploaded by Antje Wiener
Content may be subject to copyright.
Source publication
Citations
... Aunque su significado puede ser más amplio (Ekman & Everts 2024), para entender esos procesos nos basamos, en primer lugar, en el concepto y teoría de la contestación. Esta forma de aproximación a este fenómeno, tomada del constructivismo social en Relaciones Internacionales, busca comprender y explicar cómo operan los procesos de cuestionamiento de normas e instituciones internacionales (Wiener 2014;2017;Orchard & Wiener 2023). La contestación, según Antje Wiener, puede definirse como "el conjunto de prácticas sociales que expresan discursivamente la desaprobación de normas" (Wiener 2017, 112), sea mediante el cuestionamiento de su legitimidad, por origen o fundamentos, por los actores que las promueven, o por su contenido substantivo. ...
Resumen: En un momento de crisis orgánica e interregno y agravamiento de riesgos globales, la ultraderecha muestra variaciones en su contestación al orden liberal internacional. Esto puede verse en las visiones geopolíticas y geoeconómicas de los neopatriotas de Estados Unidos, la Unión Europea y América Latina. Para abordar este asunto se analizan: el “Proyecto 2025” del think tank conservador Fundación Heritage, en Estados Unidos; el discurso de Viktor Orbán en la 33ª Universidad de Verano de Bálványos (2024); y la intervención de Javier Milei en el Foro Económico Mundial de Davos (2024).
Abstract: At a time of organic crisis and interregnum and aggravation of global risks, the far-right shows variations in its response to the international liberal order, as seen in the geopolitical and geoeconomic visions of neo-patriots in the United States, the European Union and Latin America. To address this issue, this text analyses the following: the “Project 2025” of the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation in the United States; Viktor Orbán’s speech at the 33rd Bálványos Summer University (2024); and Javier Milei’s intervention at the World Economic Forum in Davos (2024).
... First, the 'act' aspect of politicization is conceptualized as contestation, which accounts for the dimensions of preference and behavior. This is consistent with Wiener's (2014) definition of contestation as "the range of social practices which discursively express disapproval of norms." If there is disapproval, but no practice which expresses it, or practice without disapproval, there is no contestation. ...
What explains the politicization of EU trade agreement negotiations? Resonance with the contestation of others! In this thesis, I present a generic theory of politicization developed in relation to trade policy, but which is broadly applicable across policy fields. I argue that politicization is caused by actors who are not affected by policy decisions reacting to contestation by those who are. My theory is that actors form coalitions by advocating for resolutions to the problems of others strategically, to influence the closure of their own field of interaction, or the control of enforcement resources within it. I call this strategic behaviour 'resonance' and construct a conditional logic through which different actors are motivated to take such political action. I build on Bartolini's (2018) distinction of political action as being motivated by the will to achieve the behavioural compliance of others by affecting conditions of closure or control. From this theoretical starting point, I derive a set of ideal-typical situations in which resonating with counterparts from another field will resolve dilemmas for different types of political actors. I test the theory using a combination of statistical analysis, network science and quantitative text analysis to determine if actors 'resonate' as the theory anticipates. The thesis demonstrates the plausibility of the theory using cases spanning EU trade agreement negotiations over the past 20 years. It shows that even though politicization often begins because of stakeholder contestation, further contestation and the eventual institutionalization of politicized issues are the result of strategic behaviour by actors who resonate with stakeholders to resolve dilemmas of their own.
... Fioretos 2020), challenging the predominance of the IMF, the World Band, and the GATT and calling for a strengthening of more inclusive institutions, such as the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). To be sure, almost all orders are almost always contested to some extent, and the contestation of a cooptation-based 9 order by those who are not included in the order and its leadership is not necessarily destabilizing (Wiener 2014;Deitelhoff and Zimmermann 2020). Orders can be stable even when they are contested. ...
While the United States (US) acted as a liberal hegemon in setting up the Liberal International Order (LIO), it is increasingly contesting the inclusive legacy institutions underpinning the LIO and is instead moving towards alternative, more exclusive institutions. Why is the US contesting the institutions it once set up to stabilize the LIO? We argue that hegemonic contestation is the result of a reactive sequence that is endogenous to cooptation-based orders where hegemons face a trade-off between inclusion and control. This Cooptation Dilemma is particularly pronounced in strongly institutionalized liberal (sub-)orders, such as the international trade regime. It unfolds in three stages: Privileging control, the liberal hegemon first creates exclusive institutions, which are likely to breed contestation by excluded states. To tame their contestation, the hegemon secondly includes previously excluded states into the order making the previously exclusive institutions more and more inclusive. To compensate for the related control loss, the hegemon finally promotes alternative, more exclusive institutions, successively turning away from the inclusive legacy institutions. We demonstrate this reactive sequence by tracing the process that led to US contestation of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Our findings suggest that cooptation-based orders in general and strongly institutionalized liberal orders in particular are prone to dynamic instability.
... 17 For an overview, see Levi-Faur 2011;Grant and Keohane 2005;Bianculli et al. 2015;Heldt 2018. 18 Finnemore and Sikkink 1998;Chayes and Chayes 1993;Wiener 2014;Deitelhoff and Zimmermann 2019;Deitelhoff and Zimmermann 2020. 19 Park and Vetterlein 2010. ...
Moral responsibility is a prominent concept used in political discourses and theoretical debates. Yet disagreement remains on how it could work in practice. When attempting to address global challenges such as global poverty, combating atrocities, or artificial intelligence, approaches often revert to retrospective accounts of responsibility that focus on non-compliance with regulatory frameworks. As a result, cases where prospective responsibility would be required often go unaddressed. In this article, we introduce an analytical conceptualization of responsibility that should help to guide the application of moral responsibility in such situations. In the first step, we develop a typology that distinguishes between four types of responsibility: ‘obligatory’, ‘structural’, ‘prescribed’, and ‘discursive’. Second, we identify responsibility gaps for each responsibility type. Third, we introduce different ethical principles from political theory that help to identify potential responsibility relations. We illustrate the utility of this framework with the example of climate change, where ethical principles beyond the contribution principle have already been applied. The paper facilitates new perspectives in political debates about how to allocate responsibility in light of global challenges and enhances theoretical debates in International Relations scholarship.
... As such, agency in our framework is not an individual, let alone stable disposition. Rather, agency rests on three relationally constituted dispositions: (a) the capacity to reflect on or reactivate past patterns of behavior, (b) the ability to evaluate choices based on an idea of the future, and (c) the forward-looking awareness of what 2 Antje Wiener has made a similar argumentwho gets access to contestationfor research on international norms (Wiener 2014). We further distinguish our approach focused on agency from research on authority since more often than not 'authority is made an attribute of the actors under analysis, and these attributes are said to emerge from these actors' access to ideal typical "sources" of authority' (Sending 2017, 312). ...
One of the central assumptions of global governance is that 'problems without borders' require collaboration among multiple stakeholders to be managed effectively. This commitment to multistakeholderism, however, is not a functional imperative but the product of potentially contested agency recognition in the past. As such, we contend that a reconstruction of agency dynamics must be at the core of understanding global governance since global governors. We draw on a relational framework to lay out the basics of how to reconstruct the agency of global governors as it emerges through relations. Through these relations, entities-in-the-making advance agency claims or are ascribed agency by relevant others. Equally important from a relational perspective are recognition acts which those claims trigger. We theorize in this paper that different types of agency claims paired with different recognition dynamics determine the outcome as to who is accepted to 'sit at the table' for a particular issue. This theorization is required to (a) better understand current manifestations of global governance in their historical emergence and (b) discuss conditions of agency from a normative perspective to determine who should be the global governors of our time.
... This tendency was a result of a research agenda that overwhelmingly focused on the processes of compliance. The recent critical norm scholarship has successfully demonstrated the contested nature of the process of compliance and the prominence of rival entrepreneurial endeavours for resolving or maintaining the contestation (Bloomfield, 2016;Wiener, 2014). It has also documented the development of local institutional mechanisms for weakening the application of the diffused norm (Capie, 2008), the utilization of counter-normative grounds for eliminating the dominance of the powerful norm-imposing orders and actors (Acharya, 2011), and the fostering of resistances to the externally imposed semantic control over the local normative order during adoption (Großklaus, 2015). ...
This research problematizes the contested nature of the global norm diffusion by focusing on intra-group rivalries and fragmentations shaping local responses (often reactionary and resistant) to global norms. Such an examination is important primarily to account for what leads to shifts in the local reception of norms over time. This study empirically explores local fragmentation, rivalry and change in response nexus in the example of the reception of the global gender equality norms in Turkey by the conservative normative bloc. It reveals that the conservative bloc is not a monolithic normative order and that there are two main competing receptions of the gender equality norm within the group in Turkey. With a firm emphasis on Turkey’s first initiating and later withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention, the study elaborates how the institutionalized conservative response to gender equality has shifted from a compromising acceptance to a rejection over time.
... Over the time, the interest has shifted from understanding trajectories of norm evolution (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998;Katzenstein 1996) and localization (Acharya 2004) to current debates about norm robustness (Hirsch and Dixon 2021;Deitelhoff and Zimmerman 2019), contestation (Wiener 2014;Iommi 2020) and erosion (Clark et al. 2018;Author 2021). ...
Although it is often assumed that the Common but Differentiated Responsibilities norm has been the key instrument in structuring normative and practical functioning of the international climate regime, I argue that this principle has never become collectively shared and coherently applied. I propose three reasons that have prevented this principle from reaching a status of a collectively shared norm: i) developed countries have failed to internalize it, ii) developing countries have failed to unite behind it and iii) CBDR's key tenets have become so fiercely contested that they have prevented a coherent political implementation. This dynamic has undermined the legitimacy of the climate regime, and disillusioned many members of the developing bloc. Since the CBDR principles are key to a well-functioning climate regime, a radical action by the developed countries must be taken to advance CBDR into a collective shared normative status and political guidance.
... This logic differs from linear norm understandings, which assume a point of internalization once a norm has been established, and regard any contestation thereafter as a sign of weakening. Contestation approaches view contestation as inherent to norms because it fuels deliberations that constitute the norm's dynamic and ever-evolving meanings (Wiener 2014). They thus consider norms as continuous 'works-in-progress, rather than as finished products' (Krook and True 2012: 104). ...
... The first type, open discursive contestation, is the one that is most often discussed in the norms research literature. It refers to deliberations and public debates in which a norm's meaning, validity or application is disputed (Wolff and Zimmermann 2016: 518), or what Wiener (2014: 2) refers to as explicit contestation. Deitelhoff and Zimmermann (2020) introduce two basic forms of open discursive contestation that are closely connected to norm robustness. ...
The question of whether global norms are experiencing a crisis allows for two concurrent answers. From a facticity perspective, certain global norms are in crisis, given their worldwide lack of implementation and effectiveness. From a validity perspective, however, a crisis is not obvious, as these norms are not openly contested discursively and institutionally. In order to explain the double diagnosis (crisis/no crisis), this article draws on international relations research on norm contestation and norm robustness. It proposes the concept of hidden discursive contestation and distinguishes it from three other key types of norm contestation: open discursive, open non-discursive and hidden non-discursive contestation. We identify four manifestations of hidden discursive contestation in: (1) the deflection of responsibility; (2) forestalling norm strengthening; (3) displaying norms as functional means to an end; and (4) downgrading or upgrading single norm elements. Our empirical focus is on the decent work norm, which demonstrates the double diagnosis. While it lacks facticity, it enjoys far-reaching verbal acceptance and high validity. Our qualitative analysis of discursive hidden contestation draws on two case studies: the International Labour Organization’s compliance procedures, which monitor international labour standards, and the United Nations Treaty Process on a binding instrument for business and human rights. Although both fora have different context and policy cycles, they exhibit similar strategies of hidden discursive contestation.
... Thus, we should expect that ideas and frames carrying the meanings of policies do not remain unchanged when actors implement them in new institutional contexts (Zwingel, 2016). Likewise, this translation is not automatic, but political and often subject to contestation about the new meaning in different settings (Wiener, 2014). Implementation, in this sense, refers to the political processes that change and establish new laws, regulations, instruments and so on that guide the practices of actors directly mandated to address societal problems (Engeli and Mazur, 2018). ...
International institutions are an essential driving force of contemporary policies to combat gender-based violence but remain toothless if political actors do not implement them in domestic policies. How can scholars conceptualise the transposition of international gender-based violence norms into domestic policies? I argue that discourse network analysis provides a powerful conceptual and methodological extension of critical frame analysis to understand how frames shape the meaning of gender-based violence norms in multi-level institutional contexts. Frames’ normative and cognitive network structure invites combining discourse network and frame analysis techniques that locate frames’ power in their ability to connect different institutional spheres temporally and spatially. I outline a multi-level research agenda that traces the framing processes of international norms and their domestic implementation through gender-based violence policies in the Council of Europe’s Istanbul Convention. This agenda includes avenues to study how complex transnational policy frameworks like the Istanbul Convention play out in domestic policy implementation.
... Particularly important is the development of norm contestation, which reflects societal practices in which rules, regulations, or procedures are critically questioned. Contestation specifically focuses on how societal actors gain access to shaping these norms in ways that can have both negative and positive effects on how a norm is understood (Wiener 2014(Wiener , 2018. This argument is rooted in the principle of contestedness which Reflects the agreement that, in principle, the norms, rules and principles of governance are contested. ...
... Proactive contestations tend to occur at the constitutive state of norm implementation, and are indicated primarily as efforts to constructively engage with a norm. Typical for this practice are contestations in the process of detailing the emergence of an organizing principle (type 2 norm) such as for example the R2P or the common but differentiated responsibility norms, respectively (Wiener 2018(Wiener , 2014. Finally, interpretive contestations reflect that any given agent may have interpretive variance on how they understand a given norm. ...
