Public lecture by Antje Wiener at the University of CambridgeAntje Wiener spoke at the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) about her new book titled Constitution and Contestation of Norms in Global Governance
8 February 2017
Once norms lose normative clout, they are likely to turn into political hazards. This is in part due to the uneven perseverance of norms in time and space. Due to the social quality of norms, it follows that in order to understand how norms work, human perception is key. Human agency is therefore a central factor for norms research. This agentic aspect is enhanced by diverse effects of globalisation which are gaining in impact notwithstanding the formal validation of treaty norms and their social recognition by selected social groups. Despite formal agreement on treaties and taken-for-grantedness of certain fundamental norms, a legitimacy gap remains at the meso-level between fundamental norms and standardised rules. As recent results of elections and referendums demonstrate quite dramatically, this gap widens with the parallel development of globalised interaction (whether practised locally or globally) and individual political estrangement (whether due to social mobility or cultural diversity). As such the gap therefore represents a threat to the normative pull of international norms. This threat is notable in moments where meanings of norms are contested. The potential for normative conflict therefore grows in time, unless steps are undertaken to counter this development. To assess the role of global governance institutions as mechanisms to enhance normative legitimacy, the talk addresses the interplay between diversity and normativity as two central premises of global governance, and scrutinises the terms of engagement from the perspective of agency at sites of contestation where citizens and learned scholars intersect. The talk draws on international relations theory and James Tully’s Public Philosophy in a New Key. It proposes a novel focus on agency based on three practices of norm validation which distinguish between formal, habitual and cultural validation.