Oxford Handbook of Norms Research in International Relations

Norms research in international relations has developed sufficiently over the past thirty-five years to become its own sub-discipline within the field. It has its own corresponding 'toolbox' of concepts, approaches, and methods which have often resulted from debates representing distinct perspectives on how norms matter for IR as a field and for global international relations more generally. Even so, three groups of enduring questions continue to sit at the heart of norms research: first, the processes by which norms emerge, change or disappear, on the one hand, and by which they are contested, violated, diffused, or replaced on the other; second, the agency of actors at sites on the macro-, meso-, or micro-scale of global order, and who engages with these processes; and third, the embeddedness or interaction of norms with other pre-existing norms and structures such as the prevailing rules of engagement and clusters of normative meaning. The Oxford Handbook of Norms Research in International Relations provides a state-of-the-art overview of past, current, and future norms research in International Relations. It provides a comprehensive overview of the toolbox that has developed over this time, mapping the field's development based on key conceptual milestones, notable theoretical moves, and developments with regard to the field's contribution to social science theory development on the one hand and politics and policymaking in world politics on the other.

Sassan Gholiagha is a postdoctoral researcher at the European New School of Digital Studies (European-University Viadrina). His publications include The Humanisation of Global Politics (CUP)\ and “Between (ir)responsibility and (in)appropriateness: Conceptualizing norm-related state behaviour in the Russian war against Ukraine” in Global Constitutionalism (with Mitja Sienknecht). He has acted as reviewer for leading IR journals and was co-speaker of the thematic group on norms research in IR of the German Political Science Association. Phil Orchard is Professor of International Relations and Discipline Leader, Politics and International Studies, at the University of Wollongong and Co-Director of the UOW Future of Rights Centre. His books include A Right to Flee (CUP) and Protecting the Internally Displaced (Routledge) and co-edited books with Alexander Betts, Implementation in World Politics (Oxford), with Charles Hunt, Constructing the Responsibility to Protect, (Routledge) and with Antje Wiener, Contesting the World. Antje Wiener is a Professor of Political Science and Law at the University of Hamburg and By-Fellow at Hughes Hall, University of Cambridge. Her books include Contestation and Constitution of Norms in Global International Relations (CUP), A Theory of Contestation (Springer), The Invisible Constitution of Politics: Contested Norms and International Encounters (CUP), and Deep Contestations of the Liberal International Order co-edited with David Lake and Thomas Risse (Oxford). She is editor-in-chief of the Norm Research in International Relations Series (Springer) and founding editor-in-chief of Global Constitutionalism (CUP since 2012).