RP4: Conceived through Practice: Unearthing the Security Promise Norm and its Contested Meanings
To warrant ‘peace and security’ has been an integral part of the post-1945 United Nations (UN) Charter Order. This commitment to the principle has been demonstrated by facilitating its implementation for decades. while the promise of peace and security has enjoyed wide recognition in the UN Charter Order and is almost all-pervasive in the International Relations (IR) literature, we know relatively little about how it achieved this guiding role in international relations. More importantly, what does the promise hold in light of today’s catastrophic times? The leading question is therefore twofold: how has the security promise become a norm (historical emergence), and what does the norm hold in store for today’s global world (present substance)? So far, the security promise remains conceptually underexplored in IR. In a world political context marked by multiple threats and an international politics driven by novel types of ‘deep contestation’ this lack of systematic assessment represents a puzzling and pressing concern. Examining the norm’s historical emergence and current effect within the UN’s institutional setting is therefore RP4’ main research objective. To do this, it retraces the emergence of the security promise retrospectively, paired by multi-sited ethnographic research on the ‘norm bundles’ of ‘climate change’ and ‘war’. It aims to shed light on transformations of state-society relations and contribute to a novel pluralistic approach to the role and effect of the security promise in catastrophic times.