8 - Normative Dissonance

Summary

Chapter 8 fills in the last piece of the theoretical story of this book. It looks at the various normative tensions and governance gaps in contemporary state sovereignty and asks how sovereignty can be maintained as a set of broadly recognized norms, rather than simply as rights claims, in the face of those tensions. It introduces the idea of normative dissonance and connects this idea to arguments from political psychology about the cognitive mechanisms people use to navigate dissonant information and beliefs. It runs the idea past normative tensions in questions both of what sovereign property rights are and of who should hold those rights. This introduction of political psychology into the story of the sovereignty cartel provides a mechanism for thinking about state sovereignty as a system that cannot be reduced to a rational set of rules or to a simple discussion of interests, but that reconstitutes itself nonetheless. It is in this sense like any other social system; it does not make coherent sense, but it functions, so we make what sense of it that we can.