Contestation in IR: A brief overview of current debates

The recent turn to research on contestation in IR has emerged in two related but separate research areas. First, since the early 2000s, scholars interested in the dynamics and meanings of norms that underpin the current global order have increasingly emphasised the relevance of contestation in international politics. Predominant approaches that focused on norm diffusion and compliance were seen as too dichotomous, linear, and static. The emphasis on contestation was based on a more complex understanding of the dynamics involved in the spread, instutionalisation, and application of global norms.Footnote ⁸ Influential contributions to this debate were made by Amitav Acharya and Antje Wiener. Focusing on regional norm dynamics in non-Western/Third World contexts, Acharya introduced the concepts of ‘norm localisation’ and ‘norm subsidiarity’ to describe potential outcomes of norm contestation beyond full norm adoption or mere rejection.Footnote ⁹ This inspired a vibrant research branch looking into the adaptation and translation of norms between global, regional, domestic, or local contexts.Footnote ¹⁰ Wiener, in contrast, has worked primarily on norm contestation within Europe and at the global level.Footnote ¹¹ She represents a group of scholars that look at contestation with the aim of analysing the changing meanings and interpretations of norms of global governance.Footnote ¹² One of her major contributions to this field of research is the emphasis on the ‘dual quality’ of norms – stable on the one hand, and contested and dynamic on the other.Footnote ¹³

A second area of research that has seen a turn to contestation concerns the diverse practices of international intervention into what had traditionally been regarded the internal affairs of states. Most notably, a rich critical scholarship has emerged in recent years that empirically analyses and normatively questions ‘liberal peacebuilding’.Footnote ¹⁴ A similar, if less vibrant, debate concerns the related practice of external democracy promotion.Footnote ¹⁵ In both cases, the emphasis on contestation (or resistance) responded to a mainstream perspective that regarded the liberal norms supposed to be implemented through such international interventions as universally valid. Oliver Richmond is certainly one of the protagonists of the former debate. His main contributions centre around a critical analysis of the ‘liberal peace’ paradigm, an emphasis on local agency in peacebuilding contexts with a particular focus on resistance, and, most recently, a discussion of hybrid variants of (‘post-liberal’) peace that emerge from the encounter of international and local actors in peacebuilding.Footnote ¹⁶ In terms of contestation, Richmond’s starting point is the contestedness of the very paradigm of the ‘liberal peace’.Footnote ¹⁷ In the debate about democracy promotion, the corresponding argument has been introduced, most prominently, by Milja Kurki. Turning attention to the conceptual politics of democracy promotion, she has, in particular, brought the notion of democracy as an essentially contested concept into the debate of democracy promotion.Footnote ¹⁸

While Acharya, Wiener, Richmond, and Kurki represent different research areas in IR, they also refer to very different theoretical positions when trying to make sense of contestation. Kurki, in her 2013 book, explicitly proposes a ‘synthesis of Gramscian and Foucauldian theoretical ideas’.Footnote ¹⁹ Richmond also draws frequently on Michel Foucault, but in addition refers to a broad range of postcolonial and poststructuralist approaches as well as to the notion of ‘agonistic democracy’ as proposed by William Connolly or Chantal Mouffe.Footnote ²⁰ Acharya, in contrast, does not take any particular stance in terms of political/democratic theory. Yet, his aim to overcome a Western and Eurocentric approach to IR theory-making is based on a strong normative claim for diversity and on a critique of the marginalisation of knowledge claims of the postcolonial world in International Relations.Footnote ²¹ This is again different from Wiener: In her attempt to bring together debates in IR and International Law and to carve out a normative argument about contestation in international relations (see also below), she explicitly draws on James Tully’s multicultural democratic theory.Footnote ²²

Still, what unites the four authors – and the kind of debates they are part of – is that they respond to what they see as serious limitations of liberal scholarship: that the liberal norms of global governance are taken as a given.Footnote ²³ Contestation, therefore, is put forward as an analytical concept to grasp the diverse practices by which actors – usually the supposed recipients or followers of the norms in question – dispute the validity, the meaning or the application of norms. The most precise definition of ‘contestation’ is offered by Wiener. She describes the concept as an ‘interactive practice’ that involves ‘at least two participating agents’, is ‘generally directed towards norms (of whatever type)’ and expresses ‘disapproval’ of these norms.Footnote ²⁴ While this understanding of contestation as normative contestation suggests that the dispute is ‘mostly expressed through language’, the term also encompasses non-discursive forms of contention.Footnote ²⁵ Although the four authors look at different forms and arenas of contestation and, thus, also emphasise different aspects and issues of contestation, they by and large share this overall definition (see detailed analysis below).

The four authors exemplify a general trend in IR to study contestation of the (liberal) global order.Footnote ²⁶ Their influential role on contestation research in their respective fields makes it particularly worthwhile to explore the notions of normativity underpinning their usage of the concept of contestation. As we will show, the normative and functional justification given for contestation, the (implicit) limits as well as the preferred modes of contestation that characterise the four approaches are surprisingly similar. Additionally, despite references to poststructuralism, postcolonial critique, critical theory or agonist democratic theory, they are generally in line with mainstream approaches to global governance.

Milja Kurki: Democratically contesting democracy (promotion)

It is far from a new finding that democracy is a contested concept. Still, it was Milja Kurki and her research team at Aberystwyth University who brought this insight back into the academic debates on international democracy promotion.Footnote ²⁷ Her core contributions to the study of democracy promotion are brought together in her 2013 book Democratic Futures: Re-Visioning Democracy Promotion.Footnote ²⁸ The volume will be the main source for the following analysis.

A key analytical starting point of Democratic Futures is ‘the essentially contested nature of the idea of democracy’.Footnote ²⁹ This is, first and foremost, not a normative statement but combines an empirical observation and a theoretical argument: Empirically, Kurki points to the fact that democracy is ‘highly contested’ in both democratic theory and democratic practice;Footnote ³⁰ theoretically, she refers to W. B. Gallie’s famous argument.Footnote ³¹ Yet, given Kurki’s ‘critical theory impetus’,Footnote ³² the book is not just about analysing the patterns of decontestation that characterise contemporary democracy promotion. Kurki’s explicit normative aim is to actually promote contestation of the concept of democracy in the discourse and practice of democracy promotion.Footnote ³³ Correspondingly, she calls on ‘democracy support actors’ to embrace ‘clashing sets of values and contestation over democracy and democracy support’.Footnote ³⁴

In essence, this applies the very democratic standards of pluralist debate that supposedly guide democracy promoters to their own practice.Footnote ³⁵ Still, just as democratic theorists discuss whether and which kinds of procedural and/or substantive limits to contestation are needed in order to uphold democracy,Footnote ³⁶ the political plea for (accepting) conceptual contestation in democracy promotion is confronted with the crucial question of the limits of normatively acceptable contestation. Is any claim to some kind of democracy equally valid or legitimate? Are there basic standards that delimit what can be plausibly claimed to be a democratic model of political order or a democratic set of rights? Are there any procedural requirements for legitimate contestation in the sense that any actor that wants to engage in contestation must do so through certain institutional channels or, at least, has to respect certain procedural standards (for example, to limit contestation to non-violent or discursive contestation, or to accept that others are equally entitled to contest one’s own contestatory practice)? The plea for contestation in democracy promotion, therefore, raises the related questions of whether there are any normative standards that demarcate (legitimate) contestation either in terms of substance (the democratic quality of the models articulated) or procedure (the democratic quality of the form contestation takes).

Interestingly, this twofold problematique is not dealt with in the book, but there are quite a few implicit indications of what Kurki has in mind when arguing in favour of contestation. For instance, the models of democracy she discusses that go beyond the liberal democratic model and its variants include ‘the socialist “delegative” model and the social democratic model’, ‘participatory’ and ‘radical’ democracy as well as ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘global’ democracy.Footnote ³⁷ The same selectivity applies to the concluding discussion in which Kurki, for instance, mentions ‘social democracy or participatory democracy’Footnote ³⁸ and ‘radical or cosmopolitan democracy’.Footnote ³⁹ According to Kurki, this selection of models is ‘partially arbitrary’ and only aims at ‘an opening gambit to pluralisation of thought on democracy’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Most plausibly, however, the selection is not in fact arbitrary but rather norm-guided. There are certainly very good reasons why Kurki recommends that democracy promoters read Marx, Pateman, Galbraith, Hobhouse or Mill, but not Schmitt or Stalin.Footnote ⁴¹ Yet these reasons are not explicitly stated – and they cannot simply consist of the fact that the latter two are not generally considered to have put forward any kind of democratic theory, because this would immediately evoke the question of who, and based on which normative criteria, decides over the legitimate range of models of democracy.Footnote ⁴² In this sense, the range of ‘democratic alternatives in the fullest possible sense’Footnote ⁴³ that democracy promoters need to encourage is certainly not without limits. But it remains unclear what these limits are. In another contribution co-authored with Chris Hobson, Kurki clarifies that even when one recognises ‘a plurality of potential kinds of democracy’, ‘Russia can still be criticised for its inadequate democratic credentials’.Footnote ⁴⁴ But the question remains whether this means ‘inadequate’ in terms of one particular (contested and, thus, contingent) concept of democracy or ‘inadequate’ in a more general sense of normative standards that any democracy should fulfill.Footnote ⁴⁵

The second dimension of the problem concerns the legitimate ways in which, and mechanisms through which, contestation of democracy can be voiced. Kurki’s ‘policy provocations’Footnote ⁴⁶ suggest that democracy promoters listen to diverging voices and engage in dialogue of some kind. But the plea for listening and dialogue is not politically innocent because it immediately raises questions related to the selection of participants and the rules governing such a dialogue: Who is entitled to participate? Who invites and selects? What are the procedures? And who, in turn, decides on them?

Oliver Richmond: Emancipatory resistance to the liberal peace

Just as Milja Kurki emphasises the contestedness of democracy, Oliver Richmond points to the contested nature of liberal peace.Footnote ⁴⁷ While Kurki criticises democracy promoters for not taking into account alternative conceptions of democracy, Richmond argues that contemporary peacebuilding does not recognise ‘contestation via local agency’:Footnote ⁴⁸ In liberal peacebuilding, ‘difference is only accepted when it operates within the liberal framework, and cultures and needs are contradictorily denied’.Footnote ⁴⁹ This directly leads to Richmond’s normative goal to not only recognise and study, but actually promote contestation: With his book A Post-Liberal Peace, which brings together his main contributions on the topic, Richmond aims to enable ‘the political contestation of externalized and contextual notions of peace, of governmentality, not to mention of biopolitics’.Footnote ⁵⁰

While Richmond thus explicitly uses the term contestation, his preferred terms are ‘resistance’ and ‘critical agency’. Both generally refer to a broad array of practices by local actors that challenge, work against, reject, co-opt, or usurp international peacebuilding in some way with the aim to ‘reclaim peacebuilding’.Footnote ⁵¹ As such, resistance is intrinsically emancipatory vis-à-vis the non-recognition of local agency by liberal peacebuilding.Footnote ⁵² In contrast to Acharya, Kurki and Wiener, however, Richmond is very explicit in emphasising that the substance and the consequences of contestation (or resistance) are not necessarily desirable in normative terms. In criticising any romanticisation of the local, he observes that contestation at the local level may ‘enable, emancipate, include, exclude, self-determine, marginalize, silence, or govern’.Footnote ⁵³ As a consequence, local resistance may also lead to ‘a ‘malevolent hybridity’ in which liberal peacebuilders make deals with ‘rights-deniers, corrupt politicians, and warlords’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Still, Richmond sees a general tendency for resistance to be a positive force, offering more potential than risk on the path towards sustainable peace.Footnote ⁵⁵

Upon a closer look, resistance, in Richmond’s argument, does not constitute an end in itself, but is rather of instrumental value – as a means of enabling participation, negotiation, dialogue, and/or deliberation. Contestation through critical agency and resistance is to lead to ‘a constant process of negotiation [that] would have to include a broad range of voices from the local to the global’.Footnote ⁵⁶ The procedural aim is ‘open and free communication’,Footnote ⁵⁷ an ‘interwoven dialogue of peacebuilding’,Footnote ⁵⁸ based on ‘meaningful forms of participation for local actors and civil society’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Still, while this reads like a fairly liberal plea for deliberative dialogue, Richmond adds that there is ‘considerable skepticism whether Rawlsian liberalism or Habermasian approaches might be able … to adjust to local needs, identities or traditions at all’.Footnote ⁶⁰

Resistance is thus neither good nor bad, but rather an expression of the fact that chances for meaningful participation are lacking. It is such meaningful participation that peacebuilders are to work for. In this sense, ‘a liberal peace is effectively representative of a transitional moment from which a hybridized praxis of peace may emerge’.Footnote ⁶¹ Once resistance has been successful in opening up (liberal) peacebuilding along the normative lines identified by Richmond, there is no longer a need to resist or contest – from then on, dialogue will do the trick, enable local agency and lead, if successful, to hybrid (local-liberal) contributions to peace.Footnote ⁶² Richmond’s notion of a post-liberal peace thus points to a situation in which hybridity has led both the liberal peace and ‘its others’ ‘to change while maintaining their differences and localities’; once such a ‘coexistence of difference’ has been reached, their ‘agonistic relationship’ will dissolve.Footnote ⁶³

In the end, post-liberal peace is thought of as ‘a via media’ that emerges from the encounter of ‘local knowledge’ and ‘international prescriptions and assumptions about peace’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Such a hybrid outcome implies a ‘coexistence and renegotiation of liberal versions of democracy, the rule of law, human rights, development and the market, all contained by the modern state along with local or customary forms of governance’.Footnote ⁶⁵ According to what Richmond calls his ‘eirenist’ approach, contestation and resistance can, therefore, in the end be absorbed in a hybridised version of peace that transforms, but does not replace the liberal peace. This is possible because the very underpinnings of liberal peace, such as the ‘humanist concern with social justice and wide-ranging pluralism’,Footnote ⁶⁶ facilitate ‘an ethical re-evaluation of the liberal peace’Footnote ⁶⁷ which is to be realised not in the abstract but through a turn to everyday practices of peacebuilding.Footnote ⁶⁸

Still, what demarcates such a via media in normative terms is not explicitly stated. This may be in line with Richmond’s ‘Eirenism’, but it does not prevent him from distinguishing, if in rather broad terms, between good and bad (‘malevolent’) forms of hybrid peace: Emancipation, self-determination and inclusion, for example, are good, patriarchy, corruption and exclusion are certainly bad.Footnote ⁶⁹ In this sense, it is clear that peacebuilders have a problem when ‘agency does not concur with their liberal agendas’,Footnote ⁷⁰ and that they cannot deny agency – which is, in the end, ‘the basis of all liberal politics’.Footnote ⁷¹ But if there are better and worse versions of hybridity and peace, then scholars and practitioners of peacebuilding surely cannot be supposed to treat all kinds of agency and resistance equally.

Antje Wiener: Contestation as a condition for understanding

In contrast to Kurki, Richmond and Acharya, Antje Wiener’s work is explicitly centred on the concept of contestation. In fact, her most recent book is entitled A Theory of Contestation.Footnote ⁷² Contestation constitutes Wiener’s main analytical perspective on norms as well as a crucial normative concept in her work. In line with Tully’s theoretical perspective, she argues that communicative processes of contestation are both normal and normatively ‘good’Footnote ⁷³ and should, therefore, be institutionalised for global norms.Footnote ⁷⁴

For Wiener, contestation refers to conflicts over the meaning (or meaning-in-use) of norms.Footnote ⁷⁵ They involve ‘the range of social practices, which discursively express disapproval of norms’,Footnote ⁷⁶ although more implicit forms of contestation are also included. Depending on the environment where contestation takes place, it can take the form of arbitration, deliberation, justification, or contention.

Because the meanings of norms are created in interactive processes and are based on social practices in specific contexts,Footnote ⁷⁷ norms are part of endless cycles of reinterpretation.Footnote ⁷⁸ Considering this, the international system presents special challenges. International norms are generally agreed upon in inter-state negotiation processes. Yet, in this context, actors might not have overlapping organisational customs and are thus thrown back to their cultural practices.Footnote ⁷⁹

This focus on contestation based on different ‘cultural practices’ emerges from what she calls an ‘inter-national’ perspective on global politics.Footnote ⁸⁰ Wiener strongly rejects the idea that something like a shared ‘life world’ or a shared value system can exist at the international level,Footnote ⁸¹ even in the arena of diplomats. This has always been assumed to be a basic condition for applying the concept of arguing, or more specifically, Habermasian communicative action, to international relations.Footnote ⁸² For Wiener, ‘culture needs to be taken seriously’Footnote ⁸³ – although she understands culture as a dynamic concept. She argues that interaction at an ‘inter-national’ level is always affected by the ‘normative baggage’ of actors, which is different for any individual but is generally shaped by specific sociopolitical contexts.

According to Wiener, then, norm contestation represents an opportunity – if not a necessity – for global governance.Footnote ⁸⁴ In a major 2004 article, she explicitly argues that contestation is ‘central for establishing the legitimacy of compliance processes; indeed, it is constitutive towards social legitimacy’.Footnote ⁸⁵ At the same time, however, too much contestation and contestation at the wrong level can create (dangerous) international conflict.Footnote ⁸⁶ Wiener expects, for example, that situations of immediate crises can deepen contestation because no time is left for the development of joint organisational practices and for deliberation.Footnote ⁸⁷

Processes of understanding that are part of contestation must, therefore, help explicate different meanings and interpretations of norms to make it possible to ‘sort … out the normative baggage’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Only such a sorting-out makes international norms legitimate, as ‘the power of norms depends on the degree to which normative meaning overlaps in socio-cultural interfaces’.Footnote ⁸⁹ The aim, although not explicitly stated, is the creation of legitimate order by enhancing ‘understanding’ beyond the state.Footnote ⁹⁰

Wiener searches for mechanisms to avoid (dangerous) international conflicts and argues that contestation can help in this regard, especially if it generates organising principles, that is, norms at a mid-level between abstract general principles, such as sustainability, and specific rules and regulations, such as net sizes in fishery.Footnote ⁹¹ Yet contestation only enhances the legitimacy of norms if it is institutionalised and ‘only under certain conditions such as social interaction in shared context over a prolonged period of time’.Footnote ⁹² Only then can different meanings of norms be processed and negotiated. Wiener leaves open in which kind of transnational arenas such negotiation should take place.Footnote ⁹³ According to Wiener, communication in transnational arenas requires equal access for, and mutual recognition of, all those affected by norms.Footnote ⁹⁴ In the end, ‘regular contestation would be routinely practiced to facilitate a bottom-up participation of multiple stakeholders in order to effectively cap conflict’: Once ‘normativity’ is negotiated at an earlier stage of the compliance process, ‘misunderstandings or disagreements that are prone to generate conflict through spontaneous or strategic contestation at a later point in time’ can be addressed and solved.Footnote ⁹⁵

Several points remain to be specified, however. Wiener, for instance, neither clarifies nor illustrates the potential for conflict that (irregular) contestation implies:Footnote ⁹⁶ Does she refer to violent conflict? Does conflict refer to a radicalisation of contestation, or does conflict mean that a norm has lost its legitimacy? In addition, we learn little on how ‘understanding’ can be brought about in transnational arenas and how it must be institutionalised to produce legitimacy, much the same as we learn little about both the substantive and procedural limits of ‘dialogue’ from the other authors.

While referring specifically to James Tully’s account of democracy and contestation and, thus, to a democratic theory of a more agonist kind, Wiener’s practical suggestions for how to deal with contestation still suggest a certain dislike of more adversarial forms of politics. First, according to her, understanding is always possible (if the right institutions are available); second, conflict or more fundamental confrontation is to be avoided; third, shared meanings must be constructed in order to give norms legitimacy.

As a result, according to Wiener, the possibility of ‘constructive’ contestation leading to shared understanding is empirically uncertain in international politics – but normatively speaking, it is nonetheless to be aimed for. However, contestation is not normatively desirable per se, but it is ‘good’ because it is seen as instrumental for opening up spaces for understanding and for creating a more legitimate global order.

Amitav Acharya: Dialogue under a Banyan tree

As mentioned above, Amitav Acharya’s research focuses on the processes through which global norms are interpreted, changed and resisted in new contexts, in particular in non-Western/Third World regions. The starting point of this ‘norm dynamic’ is ‘the contestation between emerging transnational norms and preexisting regional normative and social orders’.Footnote ⁹⁷ Such contestation, Acharya argues, regularly inhibits wholesale acceptance of a given norm (that is, full compliance), while also often inhibiting outright rejection. Instead, it mostly leads to processes which Acharya calls ‘localization’: processes of framing and grafting by local actors that give a norm legitimacy ‘by infusing it with local characteristics and by making it congruent with the local context’.Footnote ⁹⁸ Later, Acharya has complemented this concept of localisation with a more contentious type of reaction by local actors, namely ‘norm subsidiarity’.Footnote ⁹⁹ In this case, contestation leads local actors to reject specific external ideas and try to establish ‘subsidiary’ norms to counter outside influences or promote other international norms they consider more universal.

His early work explicitly aimed at providing an analytic framework for understanding norm transfer. Empirically, his work focuses on regional reactions to norms and ideas, especially in South East Asia, for example with regard to the diffusion of the concept of human security. In this context, he describes localisation and subsidiarity as processes in which contestation by local actors is the main driver.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Recent considerations on how this framework of localisation and subsidiarity fits with the diffusion and promotion of human rights norms have – at least implicitly – strong normative elements. In his latest work, Acharya introduces the metaphor of the Banyan tree to illustrate human rights diffusion – as an alternative to the well-known boomerang model in IR norm research.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In the classic boomerang model, human rights diffusion is brought about by a coalition of domestic human rights activists, transnational human rights networks, and Western states that use public shaming and sanctions to pressure a domestic (authoritarian) government to commit to human rights reforms.Footnote ¹⁰² Acharya criticises this model as painting a stereotypical picture of Western human rights supporters and non-Western resistors, and as presenting an overly adversarial style of interaction over human rights as normality.Footnote ¹⁰³ Human rights advancement today, he argues, largely takes place in an evolutionary manner and is mostly carried out by insider proponents.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Acharya thus emphasises the role of non-Western states as ‘norm builders’Footnote ¹⁰⁵ and locates himself in a philosophical position that stresses that human rights are not a Western concept but that cognitive priors for human rights can be found around the globe.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Although his approach is primarily aimed at explaining human rights diffusion,Footnote ¹⁰⁷ he thereby also pursues explicitly normative goals: to ‘recognize that many local beliefs and practices have robust legitimacy and functionality which should be recognized and universalized’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

To illustrate this process, Acharya introduces the Banyan metaphor. The Banyan is a large Indian tree with aerial roots, which, when they reach the ground, can grow into part of the trunk and support its large branches. For Acharya, the Banyan, as a resting place for travellers, symbolises interaction between the local and the foreign. It is also a cultural symbol and its shadow offers space for exchange, dispute settlement and consensus-building in village life. Its large canopy represents the global nature of human rights. With aerial roots (top-down) and roots which support the branches (bottom-up), the Banyan tree represents multiple constituencies translating norms and multiple ownership of human rights.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

As this metaphor shows, Acharya’s ideal of human rights diffusion is an inclusive two-way interaction of outsiders and insiders, which is not a ‘matter of imposition through legalistic means and sanctions’Footnote ¹¹⁰ but based on the principle of dialogue. Consultation and dialogue are successful mechanisms in which ‘contestations occur’, but are generally ‘not fatal’.Footnote ¹¹¹ In this interaction process, outsiders remain ‘guests not actors, they bring in new ideas, and new incentives, but it is the locals who buy and use them’.Footnote ¹¹²

Similar to the other authors, contestation then does not give rise to serious conflicts, which could not be solved through inclusive dialogue. Contestation is not expected to include fundamental differences over the validity of norms, but is a desirable practice that can lead to norm localisation, which makes norms more legitimate and ensures their functioning in new contexts. Domestic actors are the ones that decide if and how norms are adopted and localised, but Acharya seems to assume that they will be happy to localise a context-specific version of globally established rights, as long as they are not forced to do so by ‘adversarial’ interaction modes of external actors. This is, at least, what the harmonious image of guests under the village Banyan tree suggests.

The Banyan metaphor, thus, has a strong normative connotation. Contestation is supposed to lead to dialogue processes based on which locals can adapt norms to their specific local context. Fundamental conflicts over norms do not occur. However, it is not mentioned in Acharya’s texts how locals decide on the adoption or localisation – or even rejection – of norms, and if limits for contestation exist. In addition, and similar to Kurki and Richmond, the questions of what ‘dialogue’ means and how it is supposed to be implemented are left unanswered.

Similar contestation: Banyans instead of battle scenes

The four authors discussed share a critical perspective on the notion that norm research and norm promotion in international relations deal with clear-cut, conceptually fixed and universally valid liberal norms. While mainstream liberal and constructivist scholars tend to treat liberal, including democracy- and human rights-related norms as normatively unproblematic, these authors emphasise the contestation of norms. Such contestation is generally seen as theoretically unavoidable, empirically widespread, and desirable from a normative perspective. It is this latter question – the normative quality of contestation – that our analysis has focused on. Table 1 summarises the results from a comparative perspective.

Table 1 Comparing the normative notions of contestation

In all four cases, contestation is seen as per se and prima facie a good thing. This desirability (or even necessity) of contestation is justified, on the one hand, normatively: in terms of democracy (Kurki), emancipation (Richmond), or legitimacy (Acharya, Wiener). On the other hand, contestation is also seen as functional for improving democracy promotion (Kurki), enabling processes of localisation and subsidiarity (Acharya) or hybridisation (Richmond) as well as for the peaceful establishment of globally accepted norms (Wiener).

Yet it is also clear that none of the authors advocate a radically relativist position, that any contestation is good and that every result of contestation is acceptable. All four cases are characterised by the implicit argument that contestation should somehow be limited – either regarding its substance or procedurally. Models of democracy may be contested, but such contestation will or should somehow be confined to the usual models of democracy (Kurki). Liberal peace is hybridised, but this hybridisation should remain within the limits of a via media between international standards and local understandings (Richmond). Norms are contested at the international stage, but more fundamental conflict over norms is either not expected or is to be avoided by processes of ‘understanding’ in institutionalised dialogue (Wiener). Norms are localised, but – again – radical alternatives to global norms are not expected (Acharya). To be sure, Richmond explicitly raises the problem that contestation or resistance may also be guided by ‘bad’ norms or lead to ‘bad’ results. But it remains unclear how one might systematically distinguish ‘good’ (emancipatory) from ‘bad’ (exclusive, repressive) aims and results of contestation. Furthermore, we learn little about what is to be done (and by whom) if such a distinction were to be established and enforced.

In general, all four authors clearly draw some kind of limit to what they regard as legitimate or desirable contestation – but this limit is neither defined nor justified. Instead, the authors implicitly distinguish legitimate/just/‘good’ from illegitimate/unjust/‘bad’ contestation by de facto focusing their attention on those forms of contestation that they themselves regard as legitimate – as if this were the only type of contestation. Thus, none of the authors covers violent forms of contestation (or contestation that calls for violence) or a radical questioning of fundamental norms.Footnote ¹¹³ Neither do the authors reflect upon the possibility that contentious actors might not actually want to enter into a dialogue with ‘proponents’ of an existing (liberal) global order.

This largely implicit delimitation of the scope and intensity of contestation, then, enables the authors to move fairly quickly from a plea for contestation to a call for deliberation and dialogue, which is always seen as a possible step. In the end, it is not potentially fundamental disagreement about normative issues that constitutes the problem, but rather a lack of genuine dialogue or participation. Hence, all four accounts seem to suggest that the actors involved would only have to seriously talk to each other. They say little on how this is supposed to happen, however. With the exception of Acharya, the authors are critical of Habermasian perspectives and deliberative democracy and theoretically tend towards radical perspectives on democracy (Connolly, Mouffe, Tully) and, more generally, critical approaches (Foucault, Gramsci) that rather emphasise power and ideology. Still, the overall call for deliberation, participation, and dialogue does not fit well with these theoretical perspectives. Correspondingly, as we will argue in the following section, the four authors’ positions on contestation are fairly close to mainstream approaches to global governance. In terms of democratic theory, they combine liberal and deliberative approaches.

Competing approaches to contestation: Corrective or counter-power

Mainstream approaches to global governance, to the extent that they consider contestation (or critique, opposition, or resistance) in global politics, do so within the overarching liberal framework that unites liberal-institutionalist, deliberative, and cosmopolitan perspectives on world order.Footnote ¹¹⁴ From such a perspective, the emergence of contestation results from a lack of legitimacy of certain institutions and practices of global governance – a legitimacy problem that needs to be overcome by including critical voices, improving participation and strengthening accountability.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Accordingly, theories of global governance are concerned with institutional structures that could improve the quality of dialogue and increase legitimacy.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Control mechanisms linked with epistemic processes – that help understand better what others want, how others understand democracy/liberal peace, and generate better knowledge – can ensure renewed legitimacy and efficiency of global order.

Contestation, in these kinds of approaches, is understood in the fairly limited way of providing a ‘corrective mechanism’, the ultimate aim being to facilitate ‘authentic deliberation’, which would render contestation unnecessary.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Thus, authors arguing from this perspective assume that institutional representation is possible, and that the central proposition of deliberative democratic theory for dialogue holds, although it brings about a host of problems in an international surrounding: In line with Habermas’ democratic theory,Footnote ¹¹⁸ dialogue is seen as facilitating the exchange of reasons, and the participants of such dialogues, based on an intersubjective examination of reasons, are expected to agree on which reasons are more universalisable.

To be sure, the four authors discussed – implicitly or explicitly – share a critique of a liberal order in which supposedly non-liberal contestation is effectively marginalised or silenced. For the authors, contestation per se is normatively desirable, including in its less rational and more expressive and symbolic forms (especially in the work of Richmond and Kurki) and as the expression of formerly marginalised postcolonial voices (Acharya). In addition, Wiener specifically calls for the institutionalisation of regular contestation at a global level to ensure processes of understanding, although the vision for the implementation of this call remains vague. But the solution for contestation remains inclusion through dialogue. In this process, or so it seems, contestation is primarily instrumental (as a driver of change towards a more inclusive, pluralist order) and a corrective, and not conceived as at least potentially disrupting or fundamentally challenging the existing normative order.

The disrupting force of contestation, in contrast, is the concern of so-called radical approaches to global politics, which draw on agonist or radical democratic theory.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Here, the assumption of deliberative approaches that reasons can be exchanged in spaces free of power, without privileging certain positions and without hegemonic premises what good reasons should and could be, is fundamentally put into question.Footnote ¹²⁰ Scholars associated with these kinds of critical perspectives are not interested in how to legitimise global order, but search precisely for the processes and actors that challenge order: for moments of anti-order.Footnote ¹²¹ Contestation, here, is seen as constituting a counter-power that aims at overcoming an existing, particular – and in that sense always exclusionary – order.Footnote ¹²² Hence, from this perspective, ‘alternative models of politics which manifest themselves in resistant actions of excluded actors’ are explicitly appreciated.Footnote ¹²³ Mouffe, for instance, has argued that irreconcilable ethical differences make conflict a central element of democratic practices.Footnote ¹²⁴ In such agonist approaches, consensus is impossible, difference is constitutive and every collective political action spontaneous and short-lived. Every attempt to build and legitimise order will lead to renewed questioning and renewed contestation. Self-determination can be nothing but a momentous act. In radical approaches, any kind of long-term institutional embedding of alternity and contestation is refuted. An institutionalised processing of difference in dialogue is impossible.

In contrast to such radical perspectives, none of the scholars we have discussed celebrates contestation as a manifestation of counter-power or rejects institutionalisation as repressive. Instead, although they all criticise narrow conceptions of democracy and liberal norms and point to more emancipatory processes necessary to include all those affected, contestation is only seen as a good thing if it can be processed through dialogue mechanisms leading to more legitimate order. Yet, based on the critical starting point adopted by the authors discussed, this assumption is not very convincing. Diverging normative judgments notwithstanding, empirically we simply cannot exclude the possibility and reality of a radical kind of questioning of the existing order and the fundamental norms on which it rests.

Banyans and battle scenes: Ways forward

Systematically speaking, there is an easy solution for dealing with this normative challenge of radical or disruptive contestation. One could simply define contestation in a way that excludes all those kinds of expressions and forms of critique and resistance that one regards as illegitimate or ‘negative’. In line, for example, with the distinction between two forms of resistance – opposition and dissidenceFootnote ¹²⁵ – one could argue that contestation is resistance that takes place within the established institutions and does not fundamentally question them and the basic norms on which they rest. None of the four authors chooses this strategy. Wiener, at times, moves in this direction, for instance when she excludes ‘violent acts’ and limits contestation (largely or exclusively) to discursive practices.Footnote ¹²⁶ Contestation, however, would then still encompass both the questioning of fundamental norms and the existing order and statements that include a justification or threat of violent resistance.

Given the normative aims of the literature on contestation, the solution to narrowly (and normatively) define contestation as intra-systemic opposition does, moreover, not seem very plausible. We propose to conceptually recognise different types of contestation without a priori attaching an implicit normative assessment to either type. This will help researchers include the full range of contestation, facilitating a more sound analysis of the everyday practices of contestation that is both comprehensive and open to what the actors engaged in contestation actually claim.Footnote ¹²⁷ Such a thorough study of contestatory practices also cautions against the quick move to simply assuming that every contentious actor wants to be integrated into a process of dialogue and understanding.

In conceptual terms, different types of contestation can be differentiated along three dimensions. In terms of (1) intensity, contestation ranges from questioning the ways in which norms are applied to disputing their very validity.Footnote ¹²⁸ In terms of (2) depth, it varies from arguments over specific and/or technical norms to fundamental challenges to basic features of the existing normative order.Footnote ¹²⁹ Finally, the (3) form of contestation ranges from conventional, institutionalised strategies to (the call for or actual exercise of) unconventional, disruptive practices.Footnote ¹³⁰ The most moderate type of contestation combines the start of the range across all three dimensions, the most radical one is characterised by the opposite. But, in principle, any combination is possible.

It might be tempting to identify general criteria that would enable us to clearly differentiate between legitimate/‘good’ and illegitimate/‘bad’ contestation based on such a typology. Yet, we do not think this is a viable strategy. As radical approaches to democratic theory forcefully argue, any authoritative fixation of the limits of legitimate contestation is both arbitrary and repressive. What is more, there are no endogenous grounds in the concept of contestation that facilitate distinguishing between various types of contestation from the point of view of their emancipatory potential – to reframe an argument made with a view to the concept of hegemony.Footnote ¹³¹ Embedding the concept of contestation in a particular (normative/democratic) political theory does not help either because the typology of contestation is simply too abstract. On the one hand, even the liberal tradition, as represented by John Locke, for example, does provide for a right to actively, and if need be violently, resist arbitrary government.Footnote ¹³² On the other, radical approaches certainly do not regard all kinds of contestation or resistance as emancipatory.Footnote ¹³³ In this sense, what (different kinds of) political theory can do is help identify core normative standards that may, then, be applied to specific contexts and practices of contestation in order to enable a theory-guided political judgment. It goes without saying that, in doing so, research on contestation cannot narrowly look at the actors engaging in contestation but must be complemented by a normative analysis of Herrschaft, that is, of the prevalent system of rule: If we are to assess the critical potential of contestation to particular norms or to an entire normative order, we need to know what these norms contain, how they came about as well as how they are upheld and enforced.Footnote ¹³⁴

Such a critical analysis of contestatory practices, which is based on predefined normative standards, follows the strategy of critique as ‘measuring’.Footnote ¹³⁵ Yet, there is also an alternative strategy of critique that does not need normative criteria against which to evaluate contestation.Footnote ¹³⁶ From this perspective, emancipation is not a standard against which to measure practices of contestation or an existing order, but the result of practicing critique itself. Also, approaches pursuing the reconstruction of critical voices,Footnote ¹³⁷ for example in postcolonial and feminist research, aim at this type of critique: by closely listening to marginalised or dissenting voices, we can emancipate ourselves, change Western/patriarchal subjectivity and unlearn privileges.Footnote ¹³⁸ With a view to the study of contestation, this, however, also implies that it is not only the existing order and its ideological underpinnings that are to be deconstructed but also the very practices of contestation as well as our own attempts at analysing both the former and the latter.

What the two strategies of critique have in common is that they take contestation seriously without regarding it as either consistently ‘good’ or necessarily ‘bad’. They are, therefore, compatible with the broad perspective on contestation suggested above that, both conceptually and empirically, incorporates the whole range of contestatory practices. Both approaches, at the same time, are explicit about their own normative stance. In this sense, they represent two different, but complementary, ways of advancing the study of contestation in IR.