Week 12 Summaries
Judith Goldstein and Robert Keohane, eds.
Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions,
and Political Change, Cornell University Press,
1993. Chapters 1, 4, 5, 6.
Chapter 1: "Ideas and Foreign Policy: An Analytical Framework"
This book explores the role of ideas in shaping foreign policy outcomes.
The authors do not argue for the primacy of ideas over interests, but rather
that both have causal weight in the explanation of human action. Realist
and liberal accounts of IR have focused on rational explanations of behavior
that relegate ideas to a minor role. On the other hand, “reflectivist”
approaches such as that of Alexander Wendt focus on ideas but fail to articulate
or test hypotheses. The authors argue that ideas can play three important
roles that are conducive to empirical evaluation: providing principled or
causal road maps, affecting strategies where there is no unique equilibrium,
and becoming embedded in institutions.
Three Types of Beliefs:
World Views – conceptions of possibility embedded in the symbolism of a
culture and deeply affecting modes of thought and discourse. Includes
things like religion, human rights, sovereignty, Stalinism, market rationality,
etc. The volume does not focus very much on this type of beliefs.
Principles Beliefs – normative ideas that specify criteria for distinguishing
right from wrong and just from unjust. Includes ideas like “slavery
is wrong” and “abortion is murder.” These are usually derived from world
views but world views are usually sufficiently expansive to allow for opposing
perspectives. Changes in principled beliefs have a profound impact
on political action, such as the adoption of human rights norms after WWII.
Causal Beliefs – beliefs about cause-effect relationships which derive authority
from the shared consensus of recognized elites. Provides guides for
how to achieve objectives and strategies for the attainment of goals.
Examples include scientific knowledge being used to eliminate disease or Hungarian
and Polish revolutionaries drawing lessons from East Germany and Czechoslovakia
in 1989. These can change relatively rapidly, as evidenced by policy
changes related to new information on chlorofluoro-carbons (CFCs).
The Impact of Ideas on Policy:
Ideas as Road Maps – Even under rational utility maximization, ideas can
play a key role in allowing actors to form preferences and expectations as
well as select the means through which to attain goals. This will especially
be the case when actors face continual uncertainty over their preferences
and how to maximize them.
Ideas as Focal Points and Glue in Coordination – The folk theorem shows
that under repeated games, virtually any outcome can be sustained as an equilibrium.
Ideas can serve as focal points in selecting among these many equilibria.
Institutionalization – Once ideas influence the design of institutions,
their influence will be reflected through the operations of that institution.
Here, political institutions include administrative agencies, laws, norms,
and operating procedures. Ideas that become institutionalized play a
role in generalizing rules and linking issue areas.
In each chapter, the null hypothesis is that the actions described can be
understood on the basis of egoistic interests in the context of power realities.
This null will be compared to the contention that ideas mattered. Ideas
present a methodological problem because they are difficult to measure.
Inference will be based on evidentiary inference (historical/critical examination
of evidence to attach probabilities to what happened) and descriptive inference
(engaging in counterfactuals). Since theory and empirical evidence is
limited, the analysis will necessarily be incomplete, indeterminate, and methodologically
imperfect. The study seeks to establish the plausibility of the assertion
that ideas matter.
Chapter 4: Nina P. Halpern, "Creating Socialist Economies: Stalinist
Political Economy and the Impact of Ideas"
Halpern argues that “Stalinist Political Economy” or “the Soviet model”
played an important ideational role in guiding the policies of communist
countries after their establishment. Stalinist ideas consisted of a
causal argument about the best way to bring about economic growth and a principled
one about correct “socialist” choices leading towards an eventual classless
society of communism. Specifically, Stalinism mandated state ownership
for industry and collective ownership for agriculture. Micro and macroeconomic
decisions would be made by state bureaucrats, and economic growth would be
measured according to quantity of products rather than prices.
Stalinist ideas were powerful for three principal reasons. First,
Stalinism existed in the absence of credible alternatives (i.e. communist
growth models) and under apparent success in the USSR. Second, a regime
that rejected these ideas would face a coordination problem and great uncertainty
over what path to take and what to expect. Third, once institutionalized,
Stalinist ideas proved remarkably impervious to reform.
In order to provide a convincing case against the null hypothesis that Stalinist
ideas were adopted for material interests such as brute pressure or inducements
from the USSR, Halpern chooses two cases where such interests mattered very
little: China and Yugoslavia. In China, Stalinist policies were not
adopted until after Stalin’s death and have persisted despite cooling of relations
with the USSR in the 1960’s. The Chinese never developed an alternative
to Stalinism despite having significant potential to do so. Through
institutionalization in the administrative structure and the economic profession,
Stalinist ideas persisted despite inefficiency and incompatibility with underlying
economic conditions in China.
In Yugoslavia, Tito demonstrated a willingness to contradict Stalin in adopting
Stalinist policies more rapidly than Stalin wished. Yugoslavia also
moved further in the direction of full-fledged Stalinism after being evicted
from the Cominform. This makes it unlikely that Tito was bowing to political
or economic pressure from the USSR in adopting Soviet style policies.
However, after the break with the USSR, Stalinism could no longer serve the
functions of legitimation or economic development and were substituted with
a “worker-managed economy” much more oriented towards the market system.
Halpern argues that the Chinese and Yugoslav cases suggest that other East
European countries would have embraced Stalinism even in the absence of overt
pressure from the USSR. The overall conclusion is that countries, especially
after revolution, seize on preexisting ideas to guide them through times of
high uncertainty and to facilitate legitimation and coordination of action.
Chapter 5: Robert H. Jackson, "The Weight of Ideas in Decolonization:
Normative Change in International Relations"
Jackson describes decolonization as a normative process in which a fundamental
change in principled beliefs led to institutional change. Prior to World
War II, colonialism was widely accepted as legitimate insofar as the colony
was incapable of managing its own affairs. If a political system was
not “civilized,” it had no standing in international society and sovereign
states had the right to intervene and establish a tutelary regime. While
utilitarian calculations played some part, the colonial enterprise was also
deeply normative, based on notions of civilization and racial supremacy.
Hence, legitimacy could be questioned and undermined.
The notion of self-determination ultimately destroyed colonialism.
However, this notion itself underwent a remarkable transformation. During
the French Revolution, self-determination was associated with peoples and
their right to statehood, but such notions did not extend to the Third World.
After World War II, the “self” in self-determination became associated with
colonial boundaries which were political artifacts formed by Western colonizers.
Often times, multiethnic colonies resembled to old empires of Eastern Europe
which were the original targets of self-determination. Many ethnic
groups became abandoned peoples because their geography did not correspond
to colonial boundaries.
The post-WWII normative transformation turned colonialism from a legitimate
institution into a crime against humanity. Power, interest, and the
Cold War cannot account for the abandonment of the colonial system.
While some armed resistance movements were successful, most Third World colonies
had very little capability vis-à-vis their colonial masters.
The colonies had not become an economic burden. Cold War rivalries played
some role, but most colonies were not important from the big picture of the
bipolar conflict. From a counterfactual standpoint, if decolonization
was all about power and interests, one should observe a much greater variety
of patterns and timing based on capacity, resolve, the value of the colony,
etc. Such local circumstances counted for very little. Although
power and interests played some role in decolonization, ideas and norms are
necessary to account for the whole picture.
The normative shift associate with decolonization can be attributed to greater
democratization among Western states. Greater suffrage for women and
racial groups at the domestic level paralleled a greater recognition of the
right to self-determination. The USSR gave up its empire only after
it democratized. Once norms such as self-determination are granted,
they become irreversible, especially when institutionalized in international
regimes such as the United Nations.
Chapter 6: Kathryn Sikkink, "The Power of Principled Ideas: Human
Rights Policies in the United States and Western Europe"
Sikkink identifies the central role of principled ideas in shaping human
rights policies in the United States and Europe after World War II.
Empirically, the Europeans rapidly embraced a multilateral human rights regime
in the form of the European Convention on Human Rights with significant intrusion
into domestic sovereignty. In contrast, the United States did virtually
nothing until the 1970’s and then adopted an external human rights policy
with a minimal multilateral component. Only in the 1990’s did the US
start to embrace some multilateral policies such as the UN Convention on Genocide.
This divergence across the Atlantic is attributed to several key factors.
The Europeans experience the horrors of the Holocaust first hand and sought
to prevent a future recurrence. Multilateral human rights policies also
became embedded in a broader process of European integration. In the
United States, a strong coalition of “cold-warriors, conservatives concerned
about states’ rights, traditional isolationists, and segregationists” blocked
ratification of UN treaties that would allow the federal government to intervene
in state civil rights issues. In the 1970’s the picture dramatically
changed with the Civil Rights Movement and post-Vietnam trauma which changed
the focus to restoring US moral leadership and reigning in what many saw
as the imperial presidency and realpolitik of Nixon and Kissinger.
Alternate explanations of human rights policies are unconvincing.
Realism cannot account for the adoption and implementation of human rights
policies, especially in cases like Greece and Argentina where countervailing
geopolitical concerns were very large. An ideologically self-interested
argument that the West adopted human rights norms to combat the appeal of
Communism fails to explain differences in the timing and sequence of adoption.
In particular, human rights norms were largely ignored by the US during the
height of the Cold War but became increasingly prominent after the demise
of the USSR. Hence, ideas provide the most convincing explanation of
the US-Europe divergence. In the US, human rights policies were adopted
much more slowly because a cluster of more powerful ideas such as segregationism
and anticommunism were prominent for much of the post-WWII period. Only
when these ideas eroded did human rights policies emerge at the forefront
of US foreign policy.
Peter M. Haas, ed. Knowledge, Power
and International Policy Coordination, Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press, 1992.
(Also in International Organization, 46:1)
Chapters by Haas, Adler, Haas, Ikenberry, Sebenius
and Adler and Haas.
Peter M. Haas, "Introduction: Epistemic Communities and International
Policy Coordination," pp.1-35
This volume aims to enhance the existing literature on international cooperation
and international policy coordination. According to Haas, existing analytic
approaches focusing on system-level and unit-level factors that affect international
cooperation have only offered fragmentary insights. This volume examines
the role of epistemic community networks in helping states identify their
interests and in setting the issues for debate and international cooperation.
“An epistemic community is a network of knowledge-based experts who have
an authoritative claim to policy-relevant knowledge within the domain of
their expertise.” (Sebenius, p.351) Members of transnational epistemic communities
can influence state interests either by directly identifying them for decision
makers or by illuminating the salient dimensions of an issue from which the
decision makers may then deduce their interests. The epistemic communities
approach thus suggests a nonsystemic origin for state interests and identifies
a dynamic for persistent cooperation independent of the distribution of international
power. (p.4) While the form of specific policy choices is influenced by
transnational knowledge-based networks, the extent to which state behavior
reflects the preferences of these networks remains strongly conditioned
by the distribution of power internationally, and this volume focuses on
the extent of that conditioning by international and national structural
After WWII, the modern administrative state witnessed a revolutionary expansion
in professionalization, bureaucratization and the grounding of an epistemic
community (i.e. the knowledgeable elite. Through decolonization, this expansion
spread to developing world countries which wanted to emulate the Western
development models. The expansion and professionalization of bureaucracies
coupled with uncertainty and the complexity and growing technical nature
of issues considered in the international agenda have fostered an increase
in the deference paid to technical expertise and in particular to that of
scientists. Haas purports that epistemic communities can: 1) elucidate
the cause and effect relationships and provide advice about the likely results
of various courses of actions following a shock or crisis 2) shed light on
the nature of the complex interlinkages between issues and on the chain of
events that might proceed either from failure to take action or from instituting
a particular policy 3) help define the self-interests of a state or factions
within it and 4) help formulate policies.
Members of epistemic communities not only share a common worldview, but
also have shared notions of validity and a shared policy enterprise. Their
authoritative claim to policy relevant knowledge in a particular domain is
based on their recognized expertise within that domain. (p.16) Epistemic communities
basically consist of scientists or individuals from any discipline or profession
who have a sufficiently strong claim to a body of knowledge that is valued
by society. What distinguishes epistemic communities from interest groups
or other bureaucratic agencies is the combination of having a shared set
of causal and principled beliefs, a consensual knowledge and a common policy
enterprise (i.e. common interests). Because the behavior within and
by an epistemic community is guided by various normative and causal beliefs
as well as circumstances, it will differ from the behavior typically analyzed
and predicted by rational choice theorists.
Though the number of members in these epistemic communities tends to be
relatively small, the political infiltration of an epistemic community into
governing institutions can lay the groundwork for a broader acceptance of
the community's beliefs and ideas about the proper construction of social
reality. The intent of the articles in this volume is to analyze this
process in numerous concrete cases and discern the extent to which the substantive
content of policies was shaped by community views and the extent to which
other actors and political forces played a role. "The view presented in this
volume is that epistemic communities are channels through which new ideas
circulate from societies to governments as well as from country to country."
The research techniques for demonstrating the impact of epistemic communities
on the policy making process are straightforward but painstaking.
They involve identifying community membership, determining the community
members’ principled and causal beliefs, tracing their activities, and demonstrating
their influence on decision makers at various points in time. While the
members of any knowledge-based group may share criteria of validity and
a policy enterprise, members of an epistemic community in addition share
principled and causal beliefs. A robust study of an epistemic community’s
influence calls for comparative studies of organizations in which the community
has been active and those in which it has not. The aim of this volume is
to demonstrate that "...epistemic communities have exerted their influence
on decision makers in a wide variety of issue-areas. Generally called upon
for advice under conditions of uncertainty they have often proved to be significant
actors in shaping patterns of international policy coordination" (p.35)
Emanuel Alder, “The Emergence of Cooperation: National Epistemic Communities
and the International Evolution of the Idea of Nuclear Arms Control.”
Adler studies the arms control epistemic community as a subset of the broader
literature on international cooperation. He analyzes “the notion that domestically
developed theoretical expectations which were created by a national group
of experts and were selected by the US government as the basis for negotiations
with the Soviets became the seed of the ABM partial security regime.” Accordingly,
he argues that the signing of the 1972 ABM treaty did not result from changes
in the balance of power or in nuclear technologies (which would be a structural-realist
explanation) nor from “any deep sharing of strategic cultural or political
goals, but because they were able to converge on an American intellectual
innovation as a key to advancing both their irreconcilable interests and
their shared interest of avoiding nuclear war.”
“The political selection, retention, and diffusion at national and international
levels of new conceptual understandings” is described as an evolutionary
process. This process is at odds with explanations that are based on structural
realism. To demonstrate this difference, Adler suggests that in the theoretical
world of structural realists “structural reality constrains behavior and
then challenges agents to coordinate their behavior.” By contrast, in Adler’s
theoretical world, “agents coordinate their behavior according to common
practices that structure and give meaning to changing international reality.”
The epistemic community approach offers the following “comparative advantages”
in explaining the emergence of the arms control regimes between the US and
the Soviet Union. (1) It explains why super power cooperation was designed
around arms control concepts. (2) It increases the sensitivity to the role
of domestic political factors in affecting both different interpretations
of the national interest and of international practices (i.e. a two-level
game approach). (3) It demonstrates the impact of scientific knowledge on
international cooperation processes. (4) It demonstrates that the two super
powers were able to reach an agreement to govern only certain aspects of
their strategic interaction (although they had many conflicting political
interests and visions) due to their shared understanding of specific issue-areas.
(6) The common epistemic understandings seem to have out-lived the Cold War
and to continue to guide the US-Russian bilateral relationship. This provides
evidence to the strength and viability of this concept.
To describe the above selection, retention, and diffusion process, Adler
offers an “evolutionary research framework.” The framework consists of five
variables: (1) Units of variation – consists of the existing interpretations,
meanings, and expectations that circulate “within the academic and political
communities;” (2) Innovation – the process of packaging the units of variation
into a collective understanding that can be coherently presented to the public
and to decision makers; (3) Selection – “the political processes that determine
which policies are effectively adopted by the government;” (4) Diffusion
– “the spread of expectations, values, and other types of ideas to other
nations;” (5) Units of effective modification – the patterns of normative
behavior of two or more states that result from the effective diffusion of
the new norms.
The main body of the article consists of a detailed historical description
of the emergence of the arms control epistemic community from the 1950s until
the 1970s. The description is structured around the five variables. For instance,
to analyze the first variable, Adler describes the prevailing mainstream
views in the US in relation to the its nuclear strategy during the 1950s
(i.e. it elaborates on the units of variation).
The seven working hypotheses that “inform” the article’s theoretical approach
are: (1) Expectations are not deterministically derived from a structural
condition. Instead, they emerge from meanings and understandings or “theories”
that yield an interpretation of structure. (2) When there is no prior experience
with a certain phenomenon, theories (that are based on abstract generalizations,
propositions, and models) are more likely to shape the political approach
to it. (3) Due to the technical and scientific nature of these theories they
are likely to be developed in the academic circles and then taken to the
political circles. (4) Nations transmit to each other the content of their
theories thru direct and indirect means (e.g., international conventions
of scientists). (5) The transfer of meaning and concepts across national
boundaries enables decision makers to rationally calculate each nation’s
pay-offs. (6) The sharing of epistemic criteria induces decision makers to
behave according to it. (7) International cooperation evolves with, and depends
upon, the ability of decision makers to make the rational choice to learn
of those shared meanings and expectations.
Peter M. Haas, "Banning Chlorofluorocarbons: Epistemic Community
Efforts to Protect Stratospheric Ozone," pp.187-224
A striking example of international cooperation is—according to Haas—the
agreement on the protection of the stratospheric ozone. The Montreal
Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer was adopted in September
1987 imposing severe limits on global use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)
even though there was not enough data to justify that such decreases will
actually have any effect on the ozone layer. Haas attributes the successful
coordination of national policies to protect the ozone layer to the activities
of an ecological epistemic community, “a knowledge-based network of specialists
who shared beliefs in cause-and-effect relations, validity tests, and underlying
principled values and pursued common policy goals.” (p.187) Haas argues that
the epistemic community was largely responsible for identifying and calling
attention to the existence of a threat to the stratospheric ozone layer and
for selecting policy choices for its protection. Its viewpoint prevailed
in policy disputes within the US administration and influenced the major
CFC producer DuPont, creating market incentives for smaller actors to eliminate
CFCs. Thus, the epistemic community directly affected outcomes through
the activities of its members within their own governments and organizations,
and it indirectly affected outcomes by altering the market conditions from
which smaller actors formulated their interests and strategies.
The ozone negotiations were framed by a transnational ecological epistemic
community composed of atmospheric scientists and policymakers sympathetic
to the scientists’ common set of values for the preservation of environmental
quality. Though there was great confluence of views among the epistemic
community which included among others scientist from the US, Britain the
Netherlands and the USSR, the scientists nevertheless faced opposition from
groups who drew different conclusions and policy implications when confronted
with the same scientific evidence. This team, which included the CFC manufacturers
in the US, would at most tolerate a freeze in production levels while additional
research was undertaken. The epistemic community’s most potent political
resource was its ability to articulate what scientific developments implied
for policy, an ability based on its reputation for expertise in the field.
As the science improved, the credibility of the epistemic community was enhanced.
In general, public sentiment and the activities of nongovernmental organizations
had little direct impact on the adoption of CFC controls and countries in
which the ecological epistemic community did not consolidate its influence
have tended to be less directly supportive of CFC controls other than those
which were in effect determined by altered market conditions. (p.217-8)
“The ecological epistemic community played a switchboard role, communicating
with policymakers and CFC manufacturers alike, accelerating their endorsement
of the ozone research findings and encouraging corporate decision makers
to hasten their search for new products that would enable the Montreal protocol
cuts to be achieved.” (p.220) The epistemic community operated differently
at various levels of international relations. Its influence was exercised
in part through usurpation of decision-making channels and in part through
persuasion. The rapid adoption of convergent policies to control CFCs is
explained by the epistemic community’s ability to exercise influence at both
the national and international levels.
G. John Ikenberry, "A World Economy Restored: Expert Consensus and
the Anglo-American Postwar Settlement" pp. 289-321.
US and British officials held markedly different views during the initial
negotiations for a postwar economic order, notably over a nondiscriminatory
multilateral system versus a system of preferential economic groupings.
American officials at the State Department wanted to reconstruct an open
trading system, while British officials in the wartime cabinet wanted to
insure full employment and economic stability with the continuation of the
imperial preference system and bilateral trading. Despite these differences,
the British and the Americans were able to reach watershed trade and monetary
agreements that set the terms for the reestablishment of an open world economy.
Ikenberry explains the Anglo-American settlement reached at Bretton Woods
in 1944 by identifying a community of British and American economists and
policy specialists who embraced a set of policy ideas inspired by Keynesianism.
The author then examines how this community played a critical role in defining
government conceptions of postwar interests by shaping the negotiating agenda.
In particular, economists overcame a political stalemate by shifting the
focus of negotiations from highly contentious trade issues to monetary issues
about which there was an emerging “middle ground” created by Keynesian ideas.
As a result, it was possible to build political coalitions in support of
the postwar settlement.
Ikenberry argues that structural explanations, based on underlying configurations
of power and interests, are helpful but leave important issues unresolved.
Given the range of postwar economic “orders” that were possible and the divergent
and conflicting views both within and between the two governments, structural
factors do not adequately account for why the international economic order
took on the particular shape it did after WWII. At critical turning
points in history, the interests and capacities of the dominant actors matter,
but uncertainties about power structures and dissatisfaction with the prevailing
definitions of interests create opportunities for the recasting of interests.
Keynes, White and the other “new thinkers” were particularly well situated
to shape the resolution of these uncertainties: the transgovernmental “alliance”
that they formed allowed them to shape the agenda while the complexity of
the issues gave them a privileged position to advance proposals. Finally,
their ideas were particularly well suited to building winning political coalitions.
Anglo-American monetary experts were a collection of professional economists
and policy specialists who shared a set of normative and technical views
about 1) a managed multilateral order with monetary and trade practices subject
to international agreement and supervision, 2) currency stability and convertibility,
3) the establishment of an international stabilization fund, and 4) an overall
system that would work to facilitate Keynesian economic policy and social
welfare goals. These experts agreed that new techniques of international
economic management should be devised to reconcile the movement of capital
and trade with the policies that promote stable and full employment economies,
i.e. currency exchange commitments must not undermine expansionary domestic
The structural and historical setting in which the Anglo-American experts
operated was important in that it simultaneously constrained and empowered
them. Constructing a new economic order inevitably involved a postwar
reworking of the sociopolitical order in Western capitalist democracies and
recognition of dominant American economic power. The resulting system
was hegemony by consent: open but reciprocal and agreed upon rather than
opposed. Building postwar coalitions was hence key in legitimating
the exercise of American power and was accomplished by promulgating a postwar
system that had a normative appeal to elites in other nations.
The Bretton Woods agreement articulated a middle position between a 19th
century style free trade system and regional or nationalist capitalist arrangements
by allowing the operation of a relatively open system of trade and payments
as well as arrangements to support domestic full employment and social welfare.
British and American Treasury Department officials effectively shifted the
negotiations to monetary arrangements and an agreement was eventually reached,
undercutting the US State Department’s more conventional but also controversial
free trade position. With its synthesis of interventionist and liberal
goals, the Bretton Woods agreement had a political resonance within wider
and more contentious British and American policy circles, and thus played
an important politically integrating role.
James K. Sebenius, "Challenging Conventional Explanations of International
Cooperation: Negotiation Analysis and the Case of Epistemic Communities,"
In this article Sebenius proposes a different approach to understanding
cooperation under anarchy. He criticizes existing approaches on grounds of
“analytic and empirical confusion, needless distinction and false dichotomy.”
(p.323) Sebenius finds three primary problems with existing approaches on
cooperation. First, by largely treating cooperation as a binary problem, they
direct attention away from key issues of distribution and integrative potential.
Second, even when they capture distributional conflict and Pareto inferiority,
they typically do so by suppressing the exceedingly important consequences
of inherent uncertainty and the need to learn. And, third, even when
they take both power and knowledge-dependent joint gains into account, they
often treat the two as competing alternatives or as analytically separable.
(p.324 & 332)
Though more sophisticated game theory models could address these issues,
Sebenius argues that this road would be less useful than an emerging “negotiation-analytic”
approach. As far as game theory is concerned, “the number of plausible solutions
and equilibrium concepts, the multiplicity of equilibria, the deviations
from fully rational behavior, the frequent luck of common knowledge, and
the widely scattered empirical results…all cast doubt on the reliability
with which the structure and rules of a given situation can be mapped onto
a unique negotiated outcome.” (p.350) Though based on game theoretic concepts,
the negotiation-analytic approach de-emphasizes the search for fully rationally
determined, unique equilibrium outcomes. Additionally, this approach offers
a more precise characterization of power; recognizes that actors’ interests
are not always material in nature; and takes informational factors into
The epistemic community approach is relevant to the “negotiation-analytic”
approach given its emphasis on the interplay between power and knowledge
in influencing outcomes. Both negotiation analytic and epistemic community
based explanations centrally focus on both the process of reaching and the
content of cooperative agreements. From a negotiation-analytic perspective,
the major contributions of an epistemic community are the fact that:
1) it directs attention toward the conditions under which a coalition will
form and expand 2) insists on the importance of perception and learning in
negotiation and 3) deepens our knowledge of how actors come to define their
interests. However this approach also suffers from some of the same failures
of the other approaches. For instance, cooperation appears as a binary construct,
with little regard to distributive or integrative issues. “The epistemic
communities approach generally seems to separate cooperation and conflict
and as a theoretical matter pays little explicit attention to the presence
or resolution of conflict….thus while the studies of these communities often
contain rich descriptive accounts of the strategic interaction leading to
given outcomes, they offer little more than ad hoc generalizations about
the conditions under which the influence of epistemic coalitions will affect
Emanuel Adler and Peter M. Haas, "Conclusion: Epistemic Communities,
World Order and the Creation of a Reflective Research Program," pp.367-390
“International relations lacks a credible theory and set of explanations
for the sources of international institutions, state interests, and state
behavior under conditions of uncertainty….In this volume, not only do we
develop ‘particular studies that…can illuminate important issues in world
politics’, but we also offer a research program with which students of world
politics can empirically study the role of ideas in international relations.”
(p.367) According to Adler and Haas, the epistemic communities approach,
is a methodologically pluralistic approach which erases the artificial boundaries
between international and domestic politics. They feel that no single theoretical
approach taken alone offers an adequate explanation of international coordination.
Neorealist approaches are unable to deduce state interests from international
structures without resorting to auxiliary assumptions about domestic politics,
communication and socialization. Additionally, rational choice assumptions
which incorporate exogenously determined preference orderings don’t take
into account important sources of expectations lying at the individual and
institutional levels. “The theory building process we are involved in can
nevertheless be extremely useful for rational choice analysis because, ultimately,
we provide the necessary prerequisites for rational choice, explaining where
alternatives and payoffs come from.” (p.369) The epistemic community doesn’t
oppose the neorealist institutional approach which argues that states can
work together through international institutions despite anarchy; on the
contrary, Adler and Haas claim that the epistemic community theory picks
up where the neorealist theory left off. Epistemic community theory relates
institutions to the dynamic interaction between domestic and international
political games and describes these games not only in terms of material interests
but also as part of the bargaining and negotiation that take place by epistemic
communities and policymakers. It is thus an approach that bridges rational
choice and reflective institutional approaches, explaining the source of
interests and institutions.
The authors contend that the most fruitful metaphor for thinking about
epistemic communities is that of evolution. “..we do not relate to the tradition
of evolutionary biology…instead, we rely on developmental biology in which
evolutionary changes to structures, once in place, are largely irreversible
and virtually determine the array of subsequent choices available to the
species.” The epistemic community framework is thus a path dependent evolutionary
model which implies that the effects of epistemic involvement are not easily
reversed. Such a process of policy evolution has four primary steps:
policy innovation, policy diffusion, policy selection and policy persistence.
Within a framework such as that envisioned by Putnam’s two level game, epistemic
communities play an evolutionary role as a source of policy innovations and
a channel for innovation diffusion. The policy ideas of epistemic communities
evolve independently rather than under the direct influence of government
sources of authority. Their impact is institutionalized in the short
term through political insinuation of their members into the policymaking
process and in the longer term through socialization, which is particularly
important for international policy coordination. (p.373)
The authors end their piece by suggesting interesting areas for further
research on epistemic communities. Among others, they mention epistemic
communities emerging from international institutions but focusing on or operating
within specific regions, as well as epistemic communities emerging in developing
countries and in non-Western societies.
Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999. Chapters 6 and 7
Chapter 6: Three Cultures of Anarchy
In this chapter, Wendt makes two arguments: (1) anarchic structures construct
their elements and (2) anarchy can produce three logics of macro structure
based on what kind of roles (enemy, rival, and friend) dominates the system.
Structure is defined to be shared ideas or culture of an anarchic system,
and these structures and roles are instantiated in states’ representations
of Self and Other and acquire logics and tendencies that persist through
time through ensuing practices and collective representation. Wendt
argues that states in the system are functionally differentiated, and this
functional differentiation depends on role differentiation, which care attributes
of structures, not agents.
Each logic of anarchy is in turn has three different degrees of internalization
(compliance, self-interest, and legitimacy), which determine how deeply embedded
the states are in that culture. As enough number of states acquire
the particular conception of Other (enemy, rival, and friend), the logic
of anarchy becomes a collective representation, taking on a life of its own
and becoming a property of the system. In the first degree of internalization,
the norms of the system are followed because states are coerced to do so.
In the second degree, the states follow the norms for the instrumental reason
of achieving their self-interests. In the third degree of internalization,
the norms become legitimate. Only in this situation can it be said
that the norms are so deeply internalized as to affect the states’ identities
and interests. “The Other is now inside the cognitive boundary of the
Self, constituting who it sees itself as in relation to the Other.” (273)
The Hobbesian culture is characterized by the representation of the Other
as an enemy, who does not recognize the Self’s right to exist as a fee agent.
In this culture, security is a zero-sum game, and security dilemmas are acute
because of intentions of other actors in the system. The Lockean culture
represents the Other as a rival. The rival differs from the enemy in
that it recognizes the Self’s right to life and liberty, and expects others
to do the same. State sovereignty is such a right in the current international
system and has become an institution shared by many states. This culture
tends to be more peaceful as states recognize one another’s sovereignty and
hence generates the possibility of reciprocity. The Other’s conception
in the Kantian culture is friendship. Friendship requires states to
(1) settle disputes without war or threat of war and (2) states will fight
as a team if security of any one is threatened. In effect, these rules
create a security community in which there is the assurance that the member
states of that community will not settle disputes physically but in some
The cultures have both causal and constitutive effects on the internalization
of identity. The causal effect concerns “the role that the culture
plays in the production and reproduction of Other’s identity over time.”
(274) The constitutive effects of culture show, on the other hand,
that “identities and interests depend conceptually or logically on
culture in the sense that it is only in virtue of shared meanings that it
is possible to think about who one is or what one wants.” (274)
Chapter 7: Process and Structural Change
Wendt first discusses the two models of “what’s going on” in the social process.
One is the rationalist model, which takes agents as exogenous to process.
What is at stake in this model are behavioral choices. i.e. “the social process
consists of interlocking actions seeking to satisfy given identities and
interests by adjusting behavior to changing incentives in the environment.”
(366) The other model is the constructivist model, which takes agents
as endogenous to process. This model assumes that agents themselves
are in process. What is at state in this model is the identities and
interests of the actors, while agents still choose behaviors in response
to changing incentives.
Two models of identity formation: (1) Natural Selection: Natural selection
occurs when organisms that are poorly adapted to the competition for scarce
resources in an environment fail to reproduce and are replaced by the better
adapted. This process works iff survival is difficult.
(2) Cultural Selection: It occurs through imitation or social learning.
Imitation refers to the situation where “actors adopt the self-understandings
of those whom they perceive as ‘successful’,” (325) while social learning
is the mechanism in which “identities and their corresponding interests are
learned and then reinforced in response to how actors are treated by significant
Other.” (327) This takes place when actors interact, as they take a
particular role identity and then cast the others in a corresponding counter-role
that makes their own identities meaningful.
Collective identity and structural change: structural change here refers
to cultural change and occurs when actors redefine who they are and what
they want. In other words, since the structure of any internalized
culture is associated with a collective identity, “a change in that structure
will involve a change in collective identity, involving a breakdown of an
old identity and the emergence of a new.” (338) The transformation
of collective identity comes about trough the mechanism of cultural change,
especially social learning based on reflected appraisals of the Self and
Lastly, the author examines four causal mechanisms, or “master variables”
that could explain why states in a Lockean world would engage in prosocial
security policies and thereby spur collective identity formation. The
master variables are interdependence, common fate, homogeneity, and self-restraint.
The first three can be grouped as efficient causes of collective identity,
and the last as permissive cause. Through the operation of these four
master variables, states may transform the collective conception of the Self
and the Other, enabling a collective identity to emerge and resulting in
the Kantian culture of anarchy.
Emanuel Adler and Michael Barnett, "A Framework for the Study of Security
Communities", in Security Communities, edited by Emanuel Adler and
Michael Barnett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1998. pp. 29-65.
Adler and Barnett's introductory essay serves two purposes: it is definitional,
and outlines a sequence of expected development of security communities that
is "heuristic", "social constructivist" and "path dependent" rather than
"teleological". A framework for studying the emergence of security communities
is presented as having three tiers:
1) "precipitating factors that encourage states to orient themselves in
each other's direction and coordinate their policies" (face-to-face interactions,
policy coordination for whatever reason),
2) "structural elements of power and ideas, and the process elements of
transactions, international organizations, and social learning" (development
of a "we-feeling", states drawn by power "like a magnet" into interaction,
development of liberalism and democracy, purposeful trust-building, social
3) the "development of trust and collective identity formation" through
dynamic interaction of tiers 1 and 2 that lead to "dependable expectations
of peaceful change" and the creation of a "collective identity".
The sequenced causal relations between these three tiers is responsible
for the production of "dependable expectation of peaceful change", which
is the definition of a security community. Included in the definition of
"community" are shared identities, values, meanings; many-sided and direct
relations; and reciprocity, long-term interest, and even altruism (31).
A security community is not an alliance, rather, it is a crude governance
structure. "We may conceive the habits and practices of the peaceful resolution
of conflicts, and the shared norms on which they are based, as a crude governance
structure. Governance can be best defined as activities backed by shared
goals and intersubjective meanings that 'may or may not derive from legally
and formally prescribed responsibilities and that do not necessarily rely
on police powers to overcome defiance and attain compliance'"(35). The more
tightly coupled the security community, the more the role of the state is
transformed to serving community goals.
Adler and Barnett present a good example of security community in their
discussion of Tier 3. "Democratic nuclear powers do not feel threatened
by each other's nuclear weapons; even when in 1965 France withdrew from
the NATO integrated command and insisted on maintaining an independent nuclear
force, other NATO allies did not interpret this as a military threat against
their physical survival. But these same countries are quite concerned when
Iraq or Iran are feared as developing a nuclear weapons program" (46).
Adler and Barnett provide three phases in the development of security
community that appear to overlap somewhat with the three tiers of security
community. The three phases are:
In Phase I: Nascent Security Community, characterized by states that have
reasons to develop a security community, for example a common security threat,
the desire to "capitalize on an international division of labor or gains
from trade" that encourage the development of international institutions,
"cultural, political, social, and ideological homogeneity" across states,
and the "existence of powerful states that are able to project a sense of
purpose," for the security community (52).
In Phase II: Ascendant Security Community, the community is defined by
"increasingly dense networks; new institutions and organizations that reflect
either tighter military coordination and cooperation and/or decreased fear
that the other represents a threat; cognitive structures that promote "seeing"
and acting together and, therefore, the deepening of the level of mutual
trust, and the emergence of collective identities that begin to encourage
dependable expectations of peaceful change" (53). These increased institutional
interactions and social learning increase mutual trust.
In Phase III: Mature Security Community, war becomes highly improbable
because of trust, institutionalization, and a community of identity. "Regional
actors share an identity and, therefore, entertain dependable expectations
of peaceful change and a security community now comes into existence" (55).
A mature security community includes multilateralism, changes in military
planning in which "worst-case" scenaries do not include community members,
common definitions of threat, normative discourse reflect community standards,
policy coordination against internal threats, free movement of population
between member states, internationalization of authority, and a "multiperspectival"
polity in which "rule is shared at the national, transnational, and supranational
Security communities are subject to disintegration, especially after crises
such as the end of the Cold War, or during the buildup or decline of empires.
Emanuel Alder, "Seeds of Peaceful Change: the OSCE's Security Community-Building
Model," in Security Communities, edited by Emanuel Adler and Michael
Barnett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp.119-160.
Adler traces the development of the Organization for Security and Cooperation
in Europe (OSCE) in light of his constructivist and path dependent theory
of security communities. His argument is that face-to-face interactions,
"seminar diplomacy", intrusive but accepted verification missions, and moral
shunning in the context of the OSCE has led to increased trust between Western
European states and former Soviet republics, and that these processes have
been closely imitated by parallel institutions in NATO, for example the Partnership
for Peace, as well as non-European regional security associations, to create
a broad base for trust, cooperation, and shared identity.
The OSCE was constituted by the Helsinki Final Act (1975), which created
three broad areas of activity known as baskets. "Basket One contains the
ten basic principles of the OSCE, as well as the guidelines for a "cooperative
security" system based on confidence-building measures, disarmament, and
mechanisms for the peaceful resolution of disputes. Through the years it has
added injunctions concerning human rights and international terrorism. Basket
Two created the framework for economic, scientific, and environmental cooperation,
stressing the elimination of restrictions to trade, industrial cooperation,
and technology transfer. In Basket Three, dealing with the "human dimension,"
members committed themselves to cooperate on all sorts of humanitarian issues
that encourage human contacts and enhance human freedoms" (123).
Adler ascribes causal power to the OSCE's seminar diplomacy and promotion
of human rights in the downfall of the Soviet Union. Elite members of the
Soviet military establishment interacted with their Western counterparts
in seminars on democracy, human rights, peacekeeping, etc., and were thus
"socialized" to Western norms. OSCE diplomats interacted directly with civil
society groups within the Soviet bloc. These Soviet groups and elites began
pressuring Soviet leaders for reform. Gorbachev responded to this pressure,
not in order to fracture the Soviet state, but to increase the legitimacy
of communism both internally and externally. These reforms, however, led to
the breakup and democratization of the Soviet Union. "The innovation of cooperative
security and human rights practices by the OSCE contributed not just to the
recovery of East-West relations but also 'to the emergence of a 'civil society'
in various Eastern countries which prepared the ground for the revolutions
of 1989'. Thus, it ended up having a subversive effect on the Soviet empire,
promoting and speeding its demise by peaceful means" (127).
After the OSCE declared the end of the Cold War in 1990 in the Charter
of Paris, their diplomats involved themselves primarily in "securing the
internalization of liberal norms by former Communist countries and devising
the means of conflict prevention and norm implementation to guarantee the
evolution toward security community-ascendance and, later, maturity" (127),
as well as providing a location for debate and signing of arms-control agreements,
human rights monitoring, and peacekeeping (128). With only one exception,
no state has refused entry to OSCE human rights inspectors (129). Adler admits
that the effectiveness of the OSCE is limited to prevention of conflict. When
hostilities erupted in Bosnia and Chechnya, the organization was powerless
to stop the violence.
In his conclusion, Adler underlines the constructivist approach to international
institutions. "Institutions not only prescribe behavioral roles and constrain
activity, they also constitute the identity of such agents and empower them
to act on the basis of their institutional reality. . . . [and] help determine
which shared understandings will be culturally and politically selected to
become the practices and interests of governments" (150).
Peter Katzenstein, ed. The Culture
of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics,
New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Chapters
1 (Katzenstein), 5 (Finnemore), 10 (Risse-Kappen)
and 12 (Kowert and Legro). (pp. 1-32, 153-185, 357-399,
Chapter 1: "Introduction: Alternative Perspectives on National Security"
This is a book attempting to resurrect sociological perspectives on international
relations. Explanations that take state interests for granted are limited
because interests are constructed through a process of social interaction
by actors who respond to cultural factors. Both neorealism and neoliberalism
could not foreshadow the momentous changes in the international system starting
in the mid-1980’s. This volume concentrates on two underattended determinants
of national security policy: the cultural-institutional context of policy
on the one hand and the constructed identity of states, governments, and other
political actors on the other. The theoretical perspective is “sociological
institutionalism,” which focuses on the character of the state’s environment
and on the contested nature of political identities.
Definition of terms:
Norms – collective expectations for the proper behavior of actors
with a given identity. Norms can either define (constitute) identities
or prescribe (regulate) behavior, or both.
Identity – a label for varying constructions of nation- and statehood,
based typically on explicitly political conflicts between actors.
Culture – a broad label denoting collective models of nation-state
authority or identity, carried by custom or law. Culture refers to both
a set of evaluative standards (such as norms and values) and a set of cognitive
standards (such as rules and models) that define what social actors exist
in a system, how they operate, and how they relate to one another.
The end of the Cold War has opened up the key question of how to define
national security. Unconventional, broader definitions of national
security include economic competitiveness, human rights, and human welfare.
Examples of historical shifts on conceptions of national security are demonstrated
by changing views towards population policy and the transformation of plutonium
from a security to an environmental issue. However, this volume deals
with traditional, “hard” issues of national security for the sake of being
Neorealism and neoliberalism are particularly weak in focusing on systemic
factors and failing to predict interests, which requires an analysis of domestic
politics. Scholars who admit some role for sociological factors such
as Gilpin and Krasner do so sloppily or by relegating them to the distant
past. This volume relaxes two core assumptions of the two paradigms
by 1. Conceiving of the environment of states not just in terms of the physical
capability of states and 2. Focusing on aspects of institutions besides their
impact on interests, such as their constitutive function.
Social Determinant 1: Cultural-Institutional Context – Neoliberalism sees
regimes as acquiring their own dynamic and changing the calculations of state
interests. This perspective is too behavioralist and ignores how social
change engenders a process of self-reflection and political actions that are
shaped by collectively held norms. State interests and strategies are
shaped by a never-ending political process that generates publicly understood
standards for action. Neoliberalism is subsumed by this perspective,
but the two views are fundamentally similar.
Social Determinant 2: Collective Identity – Institutions not only change
actors’ incentives and regulate their behavior but also constitute the actors
themselves. The state is a social actor embedded in social rules and
conventions that constitute its identity and the reasons for the interest
that motivate actors. The domestic and international environments of
states are arenas in which actors contest norms and construct and reconstruct
Chapter 5: Martha Finnemore, "Constructing Norms of Humanitarian Intervention"
This essay focuses on the role of humanitarian norms in shaping patterns
of intervention over the past 150 years. Though not decisive, the failure
of traditional theories to explain the patterns and the correlation of changing
norms with behavior establishes the plausibility of the author’s norm-based
Contrary to realist and liberal predictions, states have often intervened
militarily to protect citizens other than their own since the end of the Cold
War. Often, the targets of intervention are geostrategically unimportant
states such as Somalia and Cambodia. Norms provide a plausible alternative
explanation for interventions. Such norms provide justifications that
connect actions to standards of justice or standards of acceptable behavior.
These norms have changed considerably over time, especially in terms of which
human beings merit intervention and how intervention should be carried out.
Institutionalization of these norms in organizations such as the UN tends
to increase their power and elaboration.
Prior to the twentieth century, intervention for the protection of non-nationals
solely involved Christians under duress from the Ottoman Turks. Geostrategic
concerns were often important, but humanitarian claims couched in religious
terms were often used as justifications. Public opinion seemed to play
a small but important role. Humanitarian goals were rarely taken when
it jeopardized other stated goals or interests of a state, as non-intervention
during the Armenian genocide demonstrates.
During the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the conception of who
deserved protection increased. The abolition of slavery and decolonization
universalized humanity with a set of rights that contributed to an evolution
of humanitarian intervention norms. The early movement against slavery
did not produce an interventionist norm since perpetrators were often Christian
nations and slaves were often black Africans. Colonization unraveled
as Asians and Africans increasingly became seen as humans with rights similar
to those of Europeans.
In the post-1945 period, virtually all interventions have been made on behalf
of non-Christians and/or non-Europeans. Strikingly, humanitarian intervention
must now be multilateral to be considered legitimate. Countries engaging
in unilateral interventions such as India in East Pakistan and Vietnam in
Uganda could not convincingly claim humanitarian justifications for their
actions. Multilateralism induces transparency and defrays costs but
also has disadvantages. The choice depends largely on the normative
context, which sees multilateralism as the only legitimate means for providing
intervention of this sort. Additionally, institutionalization has delegitimized
interventions that are not composed according to UN procedures.
Chapter 10: Thomas Risse-Kappen, "Collective Identity in a Democratic
Community: The Case of NATO"
Risse-Kappen challenges conventional explanations for the emergence and
persistence of NATO. Realist explanations fail to explain or are indeterminate
about West European and US choices at critical junctures during and after
the cold war. An alternative explanation based on republican liberalism
links domestic polities systematically to the foreign policies of states.
Realism, both of the Waltzian and Waltian types, provides indeterminate
predictions about the origins, cooperation patterns, and endurance of NATO.
Risse-Kappen proposes an alternative liberal constructivist approach.
Liberal democracies form an “in-group” of friends and an “out-group” of potential
foes. Social identification allows for the creation of a “we-feeling”
based on a mutual ability to predict each other’s behavior. Democracies
also form democratic international institutions by externalizing internal
norms when cooperating with each other. Power is downplayed and persuasion,
compromise, and consultation valued. Actors make an effort to anticipate
the preferences of their partners and define their preferences to be compatible
with their friends. Norms serve as collective understandings of appropriate
behavior. While hard bargaining will occur, issues such as domestic
constraints will matter more than power. Actors can hold multiple identities
but historical contingency and contextuality produced a zone of democratic
peace in the Northern Hemisphere.
The argument is demonstrated in reference to the various stages of the development
of NATO. At the inception, there was nothing inevitable about the Cold
War. Perceptions of the USSR as the “other” based on their non-liberal
status and refusal to join the liberal order pushed the US towards an alliance
with the Western Europeans.
During the 1956 Suez Crisis, the community temporarily broke down when both
sides of the Atlantic felt the other had betrayed community norms. The
US felt deceived by the British and French, while the Europeans saw the US
as duplicitous. The US used its overwhelming financial power to strong
arm the Europeans only when it felt basic norms of the community were violated.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, there was much more interallied consultation
than conventionally assumed. The need to preserve NATO was a key issue
at all stages of ExComm discussions. Berlin was as much of a concern
as New York City, and Jupiter missiles in Turkey became a contentious bargaining
chip because they had come to be seen as a symbol of US commitment to the
In the post-Cold War world, NATO remains alive and well contrary to Waltzian
predictions. The “otherness” of the Russians has diminished due to significant
democratic reforms. The community will expand into Eastern Europe and
may eventually create a “pacific federation” of liberal democracies from
“Vladivostok to Berlin, San Francisco, and Tokyo.” NATO may not necessarily
survive, but some institutional embodiment of liberal democratic partnership
In terms of other alliances and cooperative institutions, the EU and the
US-Israeli security relationship seem to exhibit a strong identity component.
The US-Japan security relationship, in contrast, is domestically contested
in Japan and seems to be an anomaly. Alliances among non-democracies
should conform to more traditional realist expectations.
Chapter 12: Paul Kowert and Jeffrey Legro, "Norms, Identity, and Their
Limits: A Theoretical Reprise"
Kowert and Legro provide a critical review of the norm-based approach presented
in the volume. They argue that norms must be distinguished from identities,
which are regulative accounts of actors themselves. Social prescription
should be divided into two categories: prescriptive accounts of actors themselves
(identities) and behavioral prescriptions for the proper enactment of these
identities (behavioral norms).
A “sociological turn” in international relations theory can serve to uncover
blind spots left by other theories focusing on interests and capabilities
alone. The neoclassical microeconomic foundations of neorealist and
neoliberal theories marginalize norms, only allowing for a minor role in the
institutional context. Structural theories in IR tend to ignore social
attributes of structure. Norm-based approaches problematize the assumptions
of these theories. Interests are constructed rather than assumed.
Norms shape the instruments available to actors to pursue their interests.
Normative structure shapes identities and constitutes the rules by which
The source of norms is not a fully explored topic in the volume. Oftentimes
constructivists take norms as exogenous. Scholars need to develop more
explicit theoretical propositions about the construction of sociopolitical
facts. Three tentative processes are identified:
Ecological – processes resulting from the patterned interaction of actors
and their environment. Ambiguity seems to have some role in fostering
norms. “But the effects of ambiguity are… ambiguous.” (471) Iteration
has a tendency to strengthen norms over time. It is unclear, however,
when norms will solidify and when they will fade away. Environmental
shocks can loosen commitments and undermine norms. However, defining
a shock can be problematic.
Social – generalizations about the way human beings, organizations, states,
or other political agents interact. One possibility is that norms spread
through social diffusion. But which norms, and through what channels?
Second, norms and identity might arise from a process of in-group/out-group
differentiation and social role definition. However, nations can relate
to each other in numerous ways, making such analysis complicated.
Internal – processes operating within political actors. These may
include psychological processes, the use and interpretation of language,
or the attempts of utility maximizers to attain efficient outcomes.
This approach faces a serious aggregation problem since it focuses on atomic
The authors also identify five challenges in the study of norms as follows:
Knowing Norms – defining what constitutes a norm is highly problematic.
The strength of a particular norm is very difficult to measure. A “revealed
norm” method is unreliable if some deviation from a norm does not imply repudiation.
An interpretive approach faces issues of how to distinguish manipulation and
deception from genuine forms of communication. The field is also biased
towards “norms that work” and more attention needs to be paid to the failure
or obsolescence of norms.
An Embarrassment of Norms – since multiple norms can influence a single
actor, it is difficult to distinguish the ones that matter. One can
almost always identify, post hoc, a norm to explain a given behavior.
Continuity and Change – accounting for both is very challenging. Culture
exhibits an inertial force that resists change, but explanations of change
are less straightforward. One could get around this problem by analyzing
different levels of a culture, but this could lead to an endless appeal to
nests within a given culture.
Material and Normative Worlds – norms do not exist independent of the material
world, but the relationship between the two is relatively unexplored.
Norms attached to strong nations or groups may have an advantage over others.
Agency and Norms – norms can influence interests, but actors can also manipulate
or change norms. Even an actor’s own identity can be manipulated for
strategic reasons. A distinction between internal and external norms
seems to be salient. For collective actors, identity is different from
the presentation of identity. Allowing for conscious manipulation of
norms complicates analysis considerably.