How international norms die

• Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies
• Department of Political and Social Sciences
• GGP: Global Governance Programme

In this project, the author asks: how do international norms erode? And, in particular, how do they get hollowed out whilst remaining in place?

The analysis focuses on two norms of global politics and traces their different modalities of hollowing out: the norm entailing the duty to search and rescue people at sea and the norm prohibiting the domestic use of the military. Blending discursive institutionalism with meaning-making, the argument is that norms become hollowed out through seemingly benign discourses of normalisation pushed forward by antipreneurs—norm entrepreneurs aiming to dismantle these norms. Adopting an abductive approach, the project traces the erosion of these norms over time, combining quantitative and ethnographic methods to study norms hollowing out in the central Mediterranean route (for the search and rescue norm) and Western Europe (for the norm prohibiting the domestic use of the military).

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