Vaughn Shannon

Norms Are What States Make of Them: The Political Psychology of Norm Violation

I examine why states violate norms they embrace as members of international society. The rationalist answer, that norms are violated whenever they conflict with interests, is underspecified and empirically challenged. Constructivists cannot address violations well from their structural, sociological perspective. I argue from political psychology that violations stem from the motivated biases of actors who face a moral dilemma between personal desires and social constraints. These biases compel leaders to interpret norms and situations in a manner that justifies violation as socially acceptable. The ability to do so depends on the norm and the situation. The more parameters a norm possesses, and the more ambiguous those parameters are, the easier it is for actors to interpret them favorably to justify violation. Oftentimes norms are what states make of them. If the situation is plausible for states to claim exemption, they violate; otherwise they are constrained. The U.S. invasion of Panama illustrates these dynamics.

Defending International Norms: The Role of Obligation, Material Interest, and Perception in Decision Making

States defend norms in some cases but not in others. Understanding this variation sheds light on both U.S. foreign policy and the role of normative reasoning. We report the results of four experiments embedded in a survey of U.S. elites. The experiments identified the effects of felt normative obligation (that is, the logic of what is appropriate) and concern for U.S. economic and security interests (that is, the logic of utilitarian consequence) as well as the role played by individual perceptions. We find that perceptions of another actors motivation, of conflicts as civil or cross-border wars, and of the democratic nature of victims affect decisions to defend a prescriptive norm. This finding means that theories of international relations that feature norms as structural concepts need to consider actor-level cognition when examining the operation of norms. Moreover, we find that when U.S. economic and security interests are at stake there is a much greater inclination to defend norms than when simply normative obligation is present. Most U.S. elites appear to treat the presence or absence of U.S. material interests as a legitimate criterion for deciding whether or not to defend an international prescriptive norm.

Wendt’s Violation of the Constructivist Project: Agency and Why a World State is Not Inevitable

There is a saying in the US that ‘In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.’ The certitude of death remains something beyond the power of human free will and social construction, but very little else does. But Alexander Wendt would add a third inevitability of life — the coming world state. Wendt’s article, ‘Why a World State is Inevitable’ in EJIR 9(4), argues for a teleological theory that the ‘logic of anarchy’ and the ‘struggle for recognition’ push humanity inexorably toward a single global state with a monopoly on legitimate force. I contend that Wendt’s argument suffers from irreconcilable neglect and reliance on agency. Below, I am not addressing the philosophy of teleology per se, nor am I taking on Hegel’s writings about the ‘struggle for recognition’. My focus is on three points related to the need to retain agency in Wendt’s, or any, theorizing:

Militant Islam and the Futile Fight for Reputation

The reputation debate in international relations has split into two camps: those suggesting actions affect perceptions of resolve and those who say they do not. This article engages the reputation debate in the context of militant Islamists. Using political psychology, we offer a theory of biased attributions that challenges Mercers “desires” hypothesis that reputations for irresolution do not form when an act is desirable from the perceivers eye. Motivated biases undercut any reputation for resolve in cases of firmness and challenge rationalist claims of reputation formation. Militant Islamist perceptions of U.S. and Soviet interventions in the Muslim world since the 1980s support this thesis and caution against futile wars for reputation.

Librarians in the Midst: Improving Student Research Through Collaborative Instruction

ABSTRACT We test whether and how well the presence of an embedded librarian improves the quality of student research. Students in introductory-level courses tend to have very low levels of research skills and experience. Though faculty are frustrated by this lack of skills, both students and faculty tend to have only a peripheral knowledge of the role librarians can play in helping develop their research skills. Studies suggest that embedding librarians into course instruction is the preferred method for improving students’ research skills, yet the political science teaching and learning literature rarely addresses this issue or focuses on single-class experiences, measuring change in student knowledge and skills from the beginning to the end of a semester. We compare two International Politics courses taught in consecutive fall semesters with different levels of librarian involvement in the class. We assess the changes in quality and the use of information sources in the final research papers, both from a bibliographic perspective (looking at the number, quality, and variety of sources used) as well as an information-use perspective (looking at the relevance of cited material in supporting arguments).

Judge and executioner: the politics of responding to ethnic cleansing in the balkans

International relations has often been compared to the “state of nature,” an anarchic realm in which sovereign states do as they please according to interests and power, and where international law has no force. Locke dwelled on how to get people to entrust enforcement of law to “collective bodies of men”; globally the issue is how to enforce international norms (Mayerfield, 2003, pp 106–108). This article explores the problems of enforcing human rights norms in a world between the “state of nature” and the “collective bodies” of the UN system. The horrors of ethnic cleansing are sufficient that some might assume that an international response to such behavior would be unproblematic. Here it is argued that this is not the case. One reason is that responses to events abroad are filtered through the lens of state interests. Leaders most often are not villains, but neither are they saints: they are people in power for a purpose, and their responses to norm violations such as genocide involves both morality and the calculus of perceived interests. A second reason for skepticism in the face of “never again” is the decentralized nature of the United Nations Security Council as the decision nexus for addressing matters of international peace and security. Fifteen member countries serve as judge and executioner in the defense of norms against violation. As judge, each country’s leader on the UN Security Council brings its own understandings of the norms in question, and decides whether a specific act constitutes a norm violation (e.g. ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo); and as executioner, each state brings its view as to the proper means by which to respond to the act. These conditions are a recipe for paralysis or unilateralism. Journal of Genocide Research (2005), 7(1), March, 47–66

“Dual containment” policy in the Persian Gulf: the USA, Iran, and Iraq, 1991–2000

To answer these questions, the author focuses on four actors who, from the beginning of the 1980s, have been pivotal to understanding the regional dynamics: the Lebanese state, the Palestinian refugees and their armed resistance, Hizbullah, and the United Nations mission, UNIFIL (United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon). Each of these actors has had and continues to have its own agenda with respect to the Lebanese border, and this agenda has had a profound impact on their activities in the region and the interactions with the other actors involved in managing this geographical and symbolic space (Israel, Syria etc.). Meier investigates the dynamics and the processes of interaction between these actors in their ability to modify the materials/geographical borders. In particular, he examines whether those actors were able to promote, over the years, their own peculiar narrative of the territory, and to what extent this narrative was able to influence the representation of the entirety of Lebanon. The volume is divided into two sections. In the first, which consists of three chapters, Meier, drawing from the work of Bourdieu, analyses how ‘any struggle over a physical entity is also a struggle over its classification’ (p. 2). He shows how the military activities (of war or of resistance) that shaped the southern region of Lebanon in some way constituted new identities and produced major socio-economic transformations. The second section of the book, which consists of four chapters, focuses on ‘borderland narratives’. The objective is to show—always through an analysis of the interactions between the four actors mentioned earlier—that ‘the meanings of the border are made up of collective experience, cross-border relationships and partnership of authority over this land that have all formed “mental maps”’ (p. 3). Over time, each of the actors has tried to promote its own narrative and sought to impose it inside and outside the Lebanese space. These narratives have changed the real and symbolic perception of the region and had an impact that goes beyond the mere geographical classification of a territory, namely what is called the process of ‘othering’. In the words of Foucault, narratives were a means by which the actors have produced dynamics of subjectivation and governmentality, an instrument that can shape political and social reality. Relying on years of fieldwork, Daniel Meier uses this new book to put different lines of research that have been at the heart of his studies—the intricate relationship between Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, their identity and the Lebanese political relations in the post-civil war era—to good use, which places the book at the intersection of the multidisciplinary literature on border studies and political sociology. The result is an original volume that, from an innovative perspective, illuminates the complexity of a number of political, social and cultural processes in Lebanon.