Norm antipreneurs and theorising resistance to normative change

Abstract

Norm dynamics studies typically accord a special status to norm entrepreneurs, actors who promote new global norms. But conceptually privileging these agents of change has meant the norm dynamics literature has become unbalanced and marred by case selection bias. Accordingly, an oppositional role – the ‘norm antipreneur’ – should be recognised to correct these problems. When the normative status quo in an issue-area is entrenched, a clear distinction can be drawn between the entrepreneurs and antipreneurs, because in these contexts the antipreneurs enjoy significant but under-appreciated tactical and strategic advantages. Recognising this enables the construction of a norm dynamics role-spectrum – a sort of ‘typology of roles’ – including ‘competitor entrepreneur’ and ‘creative resister’ in addition to the entrepreneur and antipreneur roles which actors might play in particular norm contestation contexts. Understanding these roles promises to improve analyses of the dynamic interactions between actors in particular norm contestation processes, thereby bringing greater overall balance to the norm dynamics literature.¹

Introduction

Ever since the so-called ‘constructivist turn’² in the late 1980s, the study of norms has featured prominently in International Relations (IR). Norms apply to multiple actors and define ‘standard[s] of appropriate behaviour for actors with a given identity’,³ meaning they provide a ‘logic of appropriateness’⁴ and define ‘legitimate social purpose[s]’,⁵ thereby constraining and/or enabling actors’ behaviour.⁶

One of the key features distinguishing constructivism from traditional rationalist-materialist IR scholarship is the way it problematises the identities and interests of key international actors rather than treating them as a priori positions or commitments.⁷ This is typically said to confer advantages on constructivists when it comes to theorising about international change.⁸ And theorising about how new norms emerge and diffuse, changing the behaviour of international actors, was the primary purpose of the seminal 1998 study of norm dynamics by Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink.⁹ They argued that ‘norm entrepreneurs’,¹⁰ actors who ‘set out to alter the prevailing normative order according to certain ideas or norms that they deem more suitable’,¹¹ drove this process.

This study argues that scholars have understudied resistance to efforts to change global norms because they have failed to accord equal analytical status to the norm entrepreneurs’ opponents, the ‘norm antipreneurs’¹² who defend the normative status quo. Recognising the antipreneur role enables the construction of a spectrum of roles that actors might play when moves are afoot to change global norms. Specifically, entrepreneurs treated as ‘pure changers’ and antipreneurs characterised as ‘implacable resisters’ should be seen as ideal types at either end of the spectrum with other roles situated between these extremes; for example, ‘competitor entrepreneurs’ sit closer to the entrepreneur, while ‘creative resisters’ sit closer to the antipreneur.¹³ The article therefore focuses more on actors – or more precisely, the roles they play – than on processes; there are plenty of process-focused analytical models of norm dynamics already, and at least one that advises how normative change should be conducted (see below for discussion of these). Instead, traces of the norm antipreneur concept – and of the other roles actors may adopt, and so therefore the role-spectrum too – are already seeded throughout the norm dynamics literature; this study therefore makes explicit what currently remains obscured and underdeveloped.

The article also argues that to identify the various roles actors are playing, and illuminates how they are played requires scholars to be sensitive to context. Particular attention should be paid to two matters. First, the institutional context matters; specifically, the degree to which the normative status quo is entrenched or institutionalised matters profoundly because antipreneurs enjoy special strategic and tactical advantages when defending entrenched norms. Drawing a distinction between entrepreneurs and antipreneurs is most useful in these instances. Second, the temporal context matters in the sense that exogenous events or contingencies such as shifts in the global distribution of power or crises affect the roles actors play and how they play them.

Ultimately, the article comes to the conclusion that recognising these roles actors might play in norm contestation scenarios promises to help scholars draw and then test hypotheses about discrete norm contestation contexts. This in turn promises to facilitate a rebalancing of the norm dynamics literature by drawing attention to currently understudied cases, namely, those in which norms did not change. Scholars may also be able to specify better when and why the various existing process-models apply, although it is conceded that further research is required before a more comprehensive typology of norm dynamics models can be constructed. Finally, while the article is mainly concerned with exploring these theoretical matters, empirical illustrations of the utility of recognising norm antipreneurs are offered occasionally. These are drawn mainly from the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and the whaling issue-areas.

The norm dynamics literature

The first part of this section reviews two prominent norm dynamics models from the 1990s and examines some of the problems that arose from their tendency to inadequately theorise about the resistance norm entrepreneurs face. The second part then explores studies that are more sensitive to resistance, providing the foundation for the later discussion of the entrepreneur/antipreneur distinction.

Early ‘compliance’ models

In 1998, Finnemore and Sikkink’s ‘norm life cycle’ model described a dynamic three-stage process of norm diffusion. First, norm entrepreneurs (typically prominent individuals or civil society groups) ‘call attention to issues or even “create” issues’ that they say require new norms to change the behavior of other powerful international actors, especially states. They then attempt to persuade a ‘critical mass’ of states to accept the new norm; those which do – the ‘norm leaders’ – then try to diffuse the new norm widely. Exactly how this occurs is context-dependent but would typically include some mixture of the targets of socialisation ‘caving in’ to extrinsic pressure to conform, or they may be intrinsically-motivated to conform in pursuit of legitimacy and/or self-esteem (that is, they would ‘fall into line with’ the norm leaders’ new normative framework). Then, after the norm had been internalised into many actors’ identities, it would acquire a ‘taken-for-granted quality’ and subsequently shape their behaviour.¹⁴ Finnemore and Sikkink conceded that new norms ‘must compete with other norms and perceptions of interest’, but the actors who resisted – and how they did so – remained conceptually neglected.¹⁵

Most of the early wave of norm dynamics studies¹⁶ therefore ‘froze’ the content of the norm being studied; the process of diffusion was treated as dynamic but the norm itself was typically seen as unchanging.¹⁷ Matthew Hoffmann argues that norms were treated as relatively static independent variables to ‘facilitate analysis and dialogue with competing [established IR] perspectives’,¹⁸ and Antje Wiener names this early wave of studies ‘compliance’ studies because they examine how actors were pressured to comply with the new norm and socialised into a normative community whose boundaries were defined by Western states.¹⁹

But this approach to norm dynamics arguably caused three related problems to emerge. First, it obscured deeper contestation of the dominant normative framework (which is currently Western-liberal). The targets of socialisation were typically treated as passive ‘norm followers’²⁰ with limited agency to resist or actively contribute to debates about norms. Second, a distinct ‘liberal bias’ emerged; scholars tended to study the spread of liberal norms, especially human rights norms²¹ but also others held dear by Western liberals like arms control²² and environmentalism.²³ Accordingly, the literature became permeated with the assumption that ‘enlightened’ Western norm entrepreneurs ‘guided’ ‘unenlightened’ non-Western norm followers.²⁴ Third, a sort of ‘linear-progress assumption’ crept in;²⁵ in other words, most norm dynamics studies examined successful cases of diffusion/socialisation, meaning contestation was not taken seriously enough. Resistance, to the extent that it was acknowledged at all, was typically only studied in the context of its own failure, implying that resistance would likely fail.

Take the so-called ‘spiral model’ from the 1999 volume edited by Thomas Risse, Stephen C. Ropp, and Kathryn Sikkink. They explicitly characterise the ‘community of “liberal states”’ as a ‘sphere of peace, democracy and human rights’, and conceive of norm diffusion as a process by which ‘target states’ were admitted to this liberal community on the latter’s normative terms only after undergoing ‘identity transformation’.²⁶ Resistance is only really contemplated at the third and ‘most precarious stage’, when oppressive regimes might ‘crack down’ on civil society groups challenging how they ruled (the Tiananmen Square incident was cited).²⁷ All three of the broader problems identified above are apparent in this model. First, the target states have no real agency other than to issue blanket denials and/or ‘squirm’ by tying themselves in rhetorical knots²⁸ (stage three) or by offering institutional concessions (stage four). They never resist by engaging in truly normative debates; instead, apparently their only effective resistance strategy is the use of coercion. Second, liberal bias obviously permeates the model. And third, despite the concession that the diffusion process may be derailed in the third stage by repression there is still a sense of inherent linearity, even teleology in the sense that the international system is steadily ‘evolving’ towards a more peaceful, moral, liberal future.

The spiral model no doubt accurately describes some, perhaps even many or most contemporary norm diffusion processes given the dominance of Western/liberal states; the volume’s case-study chapters certainly all present convincing empirical examples of liberal norms successfully diffusing. But these early models still created a ‘dog which didn’t bark’ problem²⁹ by over-emphasising the agents of change, the norm entrepreneurs (who all happened to be Western). By failing to recognise an oppositional norm antipreneur role scholars’ attention has been drawn towards ‘more noticeable’ cases in which norms changed, leading to the neglect of cases in which normative change did not occur. Thus the overarching or ‘meta-problem’ of the early norm dynamic literature is apparent; it was unbalanced because it was beset with selection biases.

Recognising resistance

Andrew Payne was one of the first constructivists to begin theorising more explicitly about resistance. He examined how one of the norm entrepreneurs’ most crucial strategies – ‘framing’ a new norm to connect it to a pre-existing widely-accepted norm – was often ‘highly contested’. He explored how labour and human rights activists had tried to promote new global labour-standards norms to improve the plight of vulnerable workers in the developing world, and how they had largely failed due to determined counter-framing. The resisters – mainly developing world actors – invoked anti-imperialist and free-trade norms to characterise activists’ efforts as ‘the North want[ing] to impose on an unwilling South’ and ‘a new form of protectionism’.³⁰

Then, in 2004, Antje Wiener studied ‘“contested compliance”… [or when] compliance conditions are challenged by the expected norm followers’. She distinguished between the early ‘conventional constructivist’ studies discussed above – which ‘focus on state behaviour as a reaction to international norms’ – and an alternative ‘neo-Giddensian understanding of a dual quality of norms as structuring and constructed’, akin to what is known as ‘consistent constructivism’.³¹ This approach ‘assum[es] norm flexibility’ and Wiener concluded that ‘social change occurs as a result of discursive interventions uttered by both norm setters and norm followers’.³² Thus instead of just assuming that ‘norm leaders’ socialised ‘target states’ and the new norm diffused whole and unchanged, she argued that often the content and scope of the norm itself changed as both the norm setters and the (intended) norm followers engaged in contestation. Wiener developed her thinking in subsequent articles,³³ culminating in a book published in 2014.³⁴ It presented a theory of ‘contestedness as a meta-organising principle of global governance’; by 2014, she was therefore advising how new norms should be diffused across the international system, seemingly marking a shift from the consistent constructivist stance of her earlier work towards a more ‘critical constructivist’ position (that is, challenging domination, championing inclusivity, etc.).³⁵

Specifically, Wiener identified a ‘legitimacy gap’ between ‘fundamental norms’ (like sovereign responsibility for citizens’ human rights, oceanic environmental sustainability, etc.), which she believed were typically not highly contested, and the ‘standardised procedures’ to implement these norms (that is, military intervention to prevent atrocities, enforcing fishing net mesh-sizes, etc.), which were often highly contested. Wiener proposed filling this legitimacy gap by ‘establishing access to regular contestation for involved stakeholders … as an institutionalised routine to counter the potential conflict [generated by the legitimacy gap]’.³⁶ Thus if the content and scope of the ‘intermediate norms’ (the R2P norm, a norm regulating fishing quotas, etc.) that linked the fundamental norms and standardised procedures were established only after contestation was regularised with more actors contributing to debates about the new norm, these intermediate norms would have greater legitimacy and global governance would become more effective and inclusive.³⁷

Wiener’s influence on the norm dynamics literature is unquestionable. But while her model emphasises contestation – which obviously implies some degree of resistance – she nevertheless fails to account for situations in which efforts to change the normative status quo are implacably resisted. In other words, her model suggests that we will – or perhaps ‘should’ – always ‘end up with something new’ in a normative sense. In 2010, Matthew Hoffmann placed Wiener in a camp of scholars who focused on ‘contestation within a normative community’.³⁸ They examine contestation between actors who broadly accept the need for a new norm, the need for ‘change of some sort’, implying contestation typically occurs between actors from within substantially the same normative community.³⁹ These actors are therefore implicitly conceptualised as competitors who share the same basic normative understandings, which may explain why these scholars have tended to argue that norm diffusion processes should be – and can become – more inclusive.⁴⁰ This study argues instead that sometimes norm antipreneurs resist so strenuously that little or no normative change results.

Amitav Acharya has also examined resistance to norm-change, but Hoffmann places Acharya in a different camp, one that examines ‘compliance with external norms’. Hoffman places these scholars⁴¹ closer to the early wave of norm studies, although they ‘move beyond [it by] … examining the socialization process as more one of contestation between different normative systems’.⁴² In 2004, Acharya examined resistance within a ‘local’ normative community – the ASEAN region – against norm entrepreneurs from the ‘global level’ (the community of dominant Western states). His norm localisation model described how local actors responded to external pressure by adapting new norms to fit their pre-existing local normative frameworks. He found this occurred vis-à-vis the new cooperative security norm in the 1990s because ASEAN states were determined to remain the central actors in new multilateral forums.

But Acharya also found that some new norms were basically rejected, or at least not substantially implemented. This happened to the constructive intervention norm, which envisaged ASEAN members exerting more pressure on each other to respect human rights; this more-interventionist norm failed to diffuse effectively because it fitted poorly with foundational ASEAN non-interference norms.⁴³ Acharya took the idea of resistance further in 2011 by showing that some relatively weak local actors engage in norm subsidiarity, a ‘process whereby local actors create rules with a view to preserve their autonomy’.⁴⁴ He examined the failure of the collective defence norm to diffuse to South East Asia during the Cold War, finding that ‘local actors can be norm rejectors and/or norm makers’. Specifically, resistance typically involved ‘support by local actors for existing common global norms … which are vital to preserving their autonomy … like sovereignty, territorial integrity, independence and self-determination [etc.]’.⁴⁵

It is these aspects of Acharya’s work that distinguish him most from Wiener. His local actors do not share the same normative understandings, they are not from the same community as the norm entrepreneurs. Crucially, while he did argue that these local actors sometimes went beyond mere rejection of new norms into norm-making, they were still not really refining these new norms. Instead, they were creating different ‘new’ norms ‘by invoking and supporting a global normative prior’. When they went beyond flat rejectionism their resistance was creative only to the extent that they reformulated and strengthened pre-existing global-level norms – like non-interference, etc. – compatible with their pre-existing local normative understandings.

Finally, in 2013, Acharya proposed an ‘alternative framework … a combination of my prior concepts of localization and subsidiarity’. This was norm circulation, by which local actors sometimes did not just adapt to global norms, reject them, or creatively resist. Instead, they might also ‘feedback/repatriate’ another version of the ‘new’ norm (which had first issued from the global level) back to global-level forums, stimulating further negotiation and possibly leading to the norm’s refinement.⁴⁶ To illustrate, he noted the African origins of some of the ideas informing the R2P norm and he argued that a greater recognition that R2P was ‘qualitatively different in origin and inspiration’ from the older 1990s-era humanitarian intervention norm might facilitate ‘modifications to [its] scope and implementation’.⁴⁷ This article bought Acharya closer to Wiener’s position given that the actors contesting over R2P basically agreed on ‘the need for something new’ despite differing on details, although he emphasised how the repatriated version of a norm would typically have its genesis in ‘ideas and practices that have been proven to be efficacious and [had] a prior legitimacy’ in those actors’ own pre-existing normative community.⁴⁸ Thus while there may be some similar normative understandings between global/Western and local/non-Western actors upon which a compromise solution might be hammered out in fresh negotiations, these understandings still had fundamentally different origins.

Acharya’s corpus of work is impressive, yet he does fail to specify when and why each of his various models applies. He never said in 2013 that his norm circulation model makes his other models redundant; he argued instead that norm circulation best describes the R2P issue-area without repudiating his earlier studies’ findings that the cooperative security norm was adapted, the constructive intervention norm was ineffectively implemented, and the collective defence norm was resisted. We are thus left with no overarching framework for understanding when and why each outcome is most likely.

Two further studies deserve attention. The first, by Wayne Sandholtz, asserted in 2008 (in a nod to Wiener’s position) that ‘social rules guide the conduct of actors but … actors constantly reshape the rules’ because ‘the inescapable tension between general rules and specific actions ceaselessly casts up disputes, which in turn generate arguments, which then reshape rules and conduct’.⁴⁹ Norm-contestation therefore occurs in cycles. He investigated the norm against wartime plunder (organised looting, not the anarchical free-for-all of ‘soldiers gone wild’) noting that plundering had been acceptable for centuries; accordingly, Napoleonic France plundered most of conquered Europe unproblematically. But after Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, his victims demanded their cultural treasures back and then split over whether to plunder France in turn. Britain, ‘disinterested’ because it had never been conquered or plundered, argued France should be left inviolate, and it prevailed after sustained argumentation of the sort seen in legal contexts (analogies to legal maxims, reference to precedents, etc.) and by deploying its considerable diplomatic power. The anti-plunder norm was then steadily institutionalised in treaties before the Nazis profoundly challenged it by ruthlessly plundering Europe. In 1945, the victorious Allies quarrelled when the Soviets wanted to plunder Germany, but the argumentation skills and power of Western states prevailed and the anti-plunder norm was entrenched further. Most combatants in subsequent twentieth-century wars then observed and even extended it,⁵⁰ leading Sandholtz to conclude that the nature and content of norms never stand still. A dispute followed by argumentation may see a new norm replace the old norm, or it may strengthen the old norm, but the norm is always somewhat different at the end of the cycle.

There is arguably some incongruity between Sandholtz’s theoretical claims of ‘ceaseless’ norm-change and his empirical analysis. In 1815, the entrenched pro-plunder norm was overthrown by its polar-opposite. Then, over two centuries the anti-plunder norm was incrementally institutionalised and a decisive entrenching-precedent was delivered in 1945. This latter process did technically involve ‘change’: the norm became stronger. But it is change of a very different sort to the radical overthrow of the normative status quo. Nevertheless, conceptualising norm contestation processes as cyclic remains a very promising theoretical move. It suggests we should look for what the path dependence literature calls ‘critical junctures’⁵¹ when an entrenched norm is dethroned and replaced by a radically different one. Before this juncture some actors assume the entrepreneur role to overturn the status quo, while after it a new status quo is established and the same actor – in Sandholtz’s study this was Britain – may assume the antipreneur role to defend the new status quo.⁵²

Finally, in 2013, Nicole Deitelhoff and Lisbeth Zimmermann distinguished between the differing effects of two broad types of norm contestation. They argued that ‘applicatory’ contestation – disputes about when or how to apply a norm in particular circumstances – typically ‘strengthens a norm’s validity [because it] give[s] rise to learning processes … regarding the claims that a norm involves’.⁵³ They also argued that when a norm’s fundamental moral validity is questioned by the deployment of ‘justificatory discourses’ it is typically weakened because this form of contestation concerns ‘which norms a group of actors wants to uphold’.⁵⁴ Deitelhoff and Zimmermann therefore echoed Wiener by arguing that applicatory contestation strengthens a norm because it leads to the norm’s refinement. But they also channelled Acharya when they argued that justificatory contestation takes place between actors from fundamentally different normative communities.

Yet this ‘applicatory contestation strengthens’ while ‘justificatory contestation weakens’ dichotomy seems overly neat because antipreneurial resisters may engage in both types of contestation and, more importantly, applicatory contestation in the form of resistance to a new norm might weaken it. Wayne Sandholtz and Kendall Stiles quite reasonably argue that, ceteris paribus, the more precedents that accumulate to support a new norm the stronger it becomes: ‘a sole precedent can be contradicted by a single subsequent contrary outcome. With two or more precedents, the weight of the norm increases.’⁵⁵ Deitelhoff and Zimmermann did not distinguish between new and entrenched norms when finding that applicatory contestation typically strengthened norms. But promoters of new norms must secure precedents to entrench them; in these circumstances resistance to attempts to apply the new norm prevents it strengthening by preventing precedents accumulating.⁵⁶ Deitelhoff and Zimmermann’s claim that justificatory contestation typically weakens a norm seems more defensible; a justificatory attack on the moral validity of any norm, old or new, suggests that the contesting actors hold fundamentally incommensurable positions – that they come from normatively incompatible communities – which makes finding common ground difficult.

This study therefore argues that it is more conceptually promising to distinguish between types of actors with different intentions towards the norm in question, rather than types of contestation, when hypothesising about outcomes (that is, whether a norm is weakened or strengthened). In other words, some types of contestation – like resisting the accumulation of precedents – are inherently more available or more effective when deployed by antipreneurs against entrepreneurs presenting new norms. But another scholar, Clifford Bob, has addressed this question more directly than Deitelhoff and Zimmermann. And Bob concluded that actors in norm contestation processes couldn’t be easily distinguished from one another with reference to their favoured tactics and strategies. The next section therefore first discusses Bob’s ‘rival entrepreneur’ model before making a more sustained case for recognising a distinct antipreneur role.

The effect of an entrenched status quo

In The Global Right Wing and the Clash of World Politics (2012), Clifford Bob examined how Western evangelical Christian groups and the American gun lobby joined developing-world civil society actors to battle efforts to promote liberal norms (that is, toleration of homosexuality and gun control).⁵⁷ Bob’s study is therefore an example of the wider effort to correct liberal bias in the norm dynamics literature because it examines Western actors promoting illiberal norms; another is Ryder McKeown’s examination of how the George W. Bush administration promoted illiberal pro-torture norms,⁵⁸ while Bob has also explored how Israel and the United States have been promoting a ‘targeted killing’ norm with drone strikes.⁵⁹ Yet the conceptual model from Bob’s The Global Right Wing and the Clash of World Politics is his most important contribution to the norm dynamics literature.

Bob found that ‘contention between networks [of actors is] … endemic’ ⁶⁰ which at first glance is reminiscent of Wiener’s position. But Bob’s core assumptions ultimately place him closer to Acharya because his contending networks comprise actors from very different and typically very antagonistic normative communities. The sense of implacable, endless conflict permeates Bob’s model: for example, he says ‘the ferocity of differences suggests … that conflict, rather than persuasion and cooperation, should take pride of place in studies of global governance’; and elsewhere he echoes Payne, finding that some actors seek to utterly defeat their normative opponents. For example:

For every persuasive tactic, [the rival networks] deploy a dissuasive one. Consider framing. Does a resonant frame bring opponents to their knees? No. They pull out the hammer and smash it to smithereens … Nor do foes bow down to proposed norms grafted onto well-established principles. They break out the chainsaw and lop off the tender splice – or cut away the underlying doctrine.⁶¹

Bob’s warring networks are thus ‘rival entrepreneurs’; they are largely indistinguishable from one another (apart from their ‘commitment to … antithetical [normative] goals’) because the strategies and tactics they deploy against each other are so similar. He showed that both sides typically coalition-build with a wide range of like-minded actors; they forum-shop or create; they suborn members of the opposing coalition; and they engage in fierce ad hominem smear-attacks, etc. He does concede ‘changing policy is harder than maintaining the status quo – and the greater the proposed change the greater inertia’s sway’,⁶² and later that ‘a network’s position with regard to the status quo will influence the extent to which it uses affirmative or negative tactics’. But because he sees these struggles as ‘long-standing war[s]’ and ‘battles … which seldom have clear beginning or endings’ he argues that ‘all contenders deploy these strategies as conflict unfolds’.⁶³

This stands in direct opposition to the notion that actors play distinctly different roles during discrete cycles of a norm contestation process. Yet the cases Bob examines – sexuality norms and gun control norms – are not heavily-institutionalised issue-areas, at least not in the international context. He therefore arguably failed to consider cases when defenders of a heavily-institutionalised international normative status quo enjoy special strategic and tactical advantages. In other words, his model might sit beside Acharya’s various models, explaining one possible type of norm contestation process in a discrete category of cases rather than standing as a universally applicable model.

Instead, recognising a clear distinction between entrepreneurs and antipreneurs enables the construction of a spectrum of the various roles, which actors might assume in various classes of norm contestation processes. Antipreneurs are therefore defined in this study in polar-opposite terms to entrepreneurs, namely, antipreneurs are actors who defend the entrenched normative status quo against challengers.

For the entrepreneur/antipreneur role-distinction to have conceptual clarity it is most usefully deployed within a cyclic model like the one offered by Sandholtz because in two types of cases there arguably is at least a clear beginning⁶⁴ to a cycle of norm contestation. These are cases where norms are entrenched, either because they are formally institutionalised (that is, in treaties, judicial precedents and regimes’ decision-making procedures), or because a norm has a very long pedigree in state practice (like the pro-plunder norm: it was not heavily-institutionalised before its overthrow in 1815, but state-practice had nevertheless conformed with it for centuries).

The whaling issue-area is a good one to illustrate the utility of paying close attention to the institutional context in which each cycle of norm contestation takes place, and especially to pay careful attention to how entrenched a norm is. Some actors’ substantive normative positions have remained the same for decades – Japan, Norway, and Iceland have remained consistently pro-whaling – but the roles they play, and in particular the strategies and tactics they can deploy to advance their positions, have changed significantly depending on ‘which side of the status quo’ they have been on.

The pro-whaling norm was entrenched in practice for centuries, and when the International Whaling Commission (IWC) was established in 1946 its purpose was to ensure the ‘proper conservation of whale stocks … [for] the orderly development of the whaling industry’.⁶⁵ But from the 1960s onwards norm entrepreneurs (initially mainly Western environmental activists) began launching justificatory attacks on the morality and sustainability of whaling, and they succeeded in persuading major whaling states like the United States and Australia to accept the anti-whaling norm.⁶⁶ But the IWC’s voting procedures provide a significant advantage to antipreneurs; the schedule, which sets whaling quotas, can only be amended by a 75 per cent vote of members. To win this contest the anti-whaling norm entrepreneurs – which by this point included a number of powerful Western states – ‘stacked’ the IWC with new members,⁶⁷ and the antipreneurs at the time – Japan, Norway, etc. – failed to respond with counter-stacking.⁶⁸ This cycle of the contest eventually culminated in the 1982 moratorium on whaling (the schedule’s commercial quota was reduced to zero).

Since this critical juncture the pro-whaling actors who were antipreneurs in 1981 have become entrepreneurs and vice versa, meaning the strategies and tactics each actor can deploy have changed significantly. For example, it is now Japan who tries to ‘counter-stack’ the IWC by inducing states to join and support its position,⁶⁹ although it suffers from a structural disadvantage given that it ‘moved second’. In other words, anti-whalers (while they were playing the entrepreneur role before 1982) had to attract only 22 new members to raise the membership from 17 in 1979 to 39 in 1982. But Japan, now the entrepreneur in the new cycle of norm contestation, has to recruit many more members to restore a 75 per cent majority in its favour; the current 89 members are divided roughly equally between pro- and anti-whaling camps,⁷⁰ so about 45 more pro-whaling members must be found (without any additional anti-whalers joining, and assuming none defect to the pro-whaling camp) before the schedule could be changed again. Antipreneurs – Australia and New Zealand – also won an International Court of Justice (ICJ) case against Japan in 2014. The court found Japanese whalers had acted in ways ‘not reasonable in relation to achieving the stated research objectives’ therefore, limited ‘scientific’ whaling is an exception to the moratorium).⁷¹

So, while efforts to overturn the ban on commercial whaling have gathered strength recently,⁷² not least because whale stocks have significantly recovered (that is, a temporal contextual factor: see below), the antipreneurs have so far successfully defended the post-1982 status quo, and they entrenched it further in 2014 with a key precedent. While the whaling example offers some support for Bob’s claim that normative rivals use similar strategies and tactics when the contestation process is looked at holistically, it is equally apparent that some strategies and tactics are only available, or they are more effective, when an actor is playing one or the other role during a particular cycle of the norm contestation process. In such cases antipreneurs enjoy a contextually-sensitive mix of strategic and tactical advantages which the next section explores in detail.

The strategic and tactical advantages enjoyed by antipreneurs

The tactical/strategic distinction is not necessarily a sharp one, but it is still useful: ‘tactical’ is more suggestive of specific moves or actions in discrete institutional contexts while ‘strategy’ suggests the overall pattern and purpose that these more-discrete moves or actions are directed towards. It therefore makes sense to examine strategic advantages first. Norm entrepreneurs must make two strategic moves to succeed: they must first establish that there is a normative problem which warrants the launching of justificatory attacks (in Deitelhoff and Zimmermann’s terms) on the underlying morality of the status quo; then they must offer a viable solution in the form of a new norm. This logically provides antipreneurs with two strategic blocking opportunities.

First, antipreneurs can simply defend the entrenched status quo norm by refuting entrepreneurs’ claims that it produces morally problematic outcomes. The simplest way is to dismiss such claims as ‘alarmist’, and Jeffrey Legro has explored the socio-psychological advantages that antipreneurs enjoy when they do so. Legro noted that decades of psychological research demonstrate that most humans, most of the time, tend to favour the status quo. More particularly, only when an idea or norm fails catastrophically – when it produces outcomes that vary radically and damagingly from expectations – is there typically much impetus for change. Otherwise, and despite the fact that the failure of any idea or norm should, rationally speaking, induce reflection and openness to change, when outcomes are not catastrophic most humans just shrug and muddle through (what he calls the ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ disposition).⁷³ The path dependence literature has long recognised how ‘self-reinforcing sequences’ and ‘institutional reproduction effects’ provide inertial advantages to status quo norms, practices or institutions, meaning entrepreneurial promoters of change typically face high evidentiary and psychological hurdles.⁷⁴

But even if entrepreneurs succeed in making the case that there is a normative problem which requires addressing, antipreneurs can switch to their second strategy: undermining the new norm. They usually enjoy an advantage given that there are typically considerable ‘sunk costs’ in the status quo, which are put at risk by the uncertainty that accompanies change. Indeed, some outcomes of change – like disruption and inefficiency while new systems are being tested and implemented – are actually not uncertain. Legro’s research is again instructive. Even when ‘an old orthodoxy fails’, he says, it will usually survive unless a pre-existing, viable and credible competitor is readily available:

an oppositional idea with pre-existing social support that appears to coincide with desirable social results … it is likely to be the new focal point of consolidation and institutionalization. [But] to the extent these conditions are not met… the consolidation phase [that is, after failure of the old norm] is more likely to be characterized by … indeterminate political contestation [no change].

Emerging norms may therefore struggle to establish themselves even after status quo norms fail catastrophically. The mere fact they are unproven provides ‘naysaying’ antipreneurs opportunities to pick holes in the new norms, and/or tag the norm entrepreneurs as idealistic, naïve dreamers (at best; or dangerous radicals at worst). Only when the alternative norm has built up some credibility – and, crucially, some socio-institutional support – is it likely to have a chance of prevailing (Legro offers ‘free trade-protectionism, isolationism-internationalism, Keynesianism-monetarism [etc.]’ as examples of status quo norms and viable/credible competitor-norms).⁷⁵

These sorts of strategic advantages accrue to antipreneurs who defend both types of entrenched status quo norms identified above. For example, norms entrenched in state practice, despite not being formally institutionalised, nevertheless enjoy the psychological dispositions in favour of the status quo just discussed. And they also enjoy the sort of quasi-legal advantage that comes with having decades or centuries of precedent behind them; Sandholtz and Stiles argue that while the international system is obviously not exactly like a courtroom, international actors nevertheless ‘argue … [and] draw selectively and strategically on rules and precedents that support their goals’,⁷⁶ and further, that an actor ‘acting in accord with a line of precedents can be more confident that [its] action will be accepted as legitimate by other actors’.⁷⁷ But when a status quo norm is formally institutionalised additional tactical advantages may flow to antipreneurs. These can be understood broadly in two ways.

First, antipreneurs may take advantage of the formal institutional status quo to practice applicatory contestation that is not intended to force another round of negotiations about the content and scope of the new norm (as Deitelhoff and Zimmermann assume), but instead they implacably resist to prevent the accumulation of precedents which would otherwise strengthen a new norm. This can be a very important advantage because international law is very ‘sparse’. Much of it is customary, a realm of law where precedent and opinio juris (explanations states offer for their actions) are more important than is typical in a highly-codified domestic legal context.⁷⁸

The international judicial/institutional framework therefore affords antipreneurs many opportunities to block the accumulation of precedents because institutions like the World Trade Organization, with mandatory jurisdiction for members and enforceable judgements, are relatively rare. For example, states must consent to the ICJ’s jurisdiction,⁷⁹ so withholding consent enables antipreneurs to frustrate entrepreneurs’ efforts to accumulate precedents; the International Criminal Court’s principle of complementarity provides numerous ways for parties to avoid or frustrate indictments,⁸⁰ and over one third of states – including great powers like the United States, China, Russia, and India – have not ratified the Rome Statute; the Human Rights Council (HRC) can only monitor and report on human rights abuses; and UN General Assembly resolutions are advisory.

The only international institution with truly universal and non-consensual jurisdiction is the UN Security Council. But its jurisdiction is also relatively limited substantively, namely, to matters threatening ‘international peace and security’.⁸¹ More importantly, the veto-power which the five Permanent Members (P5) wield – and the fact that political rather than strictly-legal considerations typically weigh most heavily upon their deliberations⁸² – afford antipreneurs a daunting blocking capability. To clarify, the veto-wielding P5 obviously enjoy the most significant antipreneurial advantages, but many other states – like close allies of a P5 state; Israel is perhaps the prime example – can often reliably expect their P5 patron to stop otherwise damaging precedents accumulating.

Second, antipreneurs might be able to adopt what George Tsebelis has called the ‘veto-player role’⁸³ and block institutions’ efforts to produce policy made in accordance with new norms, or block efforts to reform the institutions themselves to institutionalise new norms. Regarding policy-blockage, Alex Bellamy has noted how the UN Secretary-General’s ongoing efforts to ‘mainstream’ the R2P norm by promoting numerous small policy changes across the UN system and in regional organisations have been plagued by sustained resistance at multiple sites.⁸⁴ And blockage of efforts to reform institutions themselves occurs regularly. For example, the efforts made by R2P entrepreneurs to have Security Council members take heed of ‘precautionary principles’,⁸⁵ or recognise a ‘code of conduct’ whereby the P5 ‘in matters where [their] vital national interests were not … involved, would not use a veto’,⁸⁶ or even to just formally ‘declare their position’ before voting,⁸⁷ all foundered early in the negotiations before the 2005 World Summit.⁸⁸

More generally, a range of delaying and ‘confusion-sowing’ tactics are available to antipreneurs: they might prevent discussion of whether a new norm should apply in a crisis by ‘switching out’ a friendly committee with a hostile committee; or reopen debate on a new norm after entrepreneurs had thought the matter closed; or defund an institution seeking to apply the norm. Antipreneurs have deployed all three tactics vis-à-vis R2P. For example, in 2007, the HRC appointed a High-Level Mission to investigate human rights abuses in Sudan’s Darfur region, but when its report was couched in R2P-like language – and was very critical – Sudan rallied the Arab and Asia Groups to block discussion of it. The HRC ultimately convened an ad hoc group of ‘mandate holders’ whose report failed to mention R2P.⁸⁹ Contemporaneously, Western states tried to have the Security Council apply R2P to the conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region, but China resisted, arguing that

there are still differing understandings and interpretations of this concept ... The Security Council should therefore refrain from invoking [R2P and] should respect and support the General Assembly in continuing to discuss the concept in order to reach a broad consensus.⁹⁰

And, again in 2007, Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon sought to institutionalise R2P further by establishing a new Special Advisor for the Responsibility to Protect (SAR2P) and expanding the Special Advisor for the Prevention of Genocide’ resources.⁹¹ But he was resisted strenuously in the General Assembly’s 5^th Committee, where UN budgets are set. Ban finally succeeded in 2010; but it took four years to secure these relatively minor administrative and budgetary reforms.⁹² The point is not that entrepreneurs always fail – a Council resolution vis-à-vis Darfur which used R2P-like language was eventually passed in 2009,⁹³ and Ban got his funding – but instead that antipreneurs typically have numerous tactical opportunities to frustrate entrepreneurs’ efforts to apply and entrench new norms.

Finally, and building on this last point, the general argument is not that antipreneurs enjoy ‘unassailable’ institutional advantages or that the relative power of international actors ‘doesn’t matter’ so much as antipreneurs often enjoy inherent institutional advantages. The fact that the norm of sovereignty remains the basic ordering principle of the international system means that international institutions have typically been designed in ways which enable states – even relatively weak ones – to defend their sovereignty by requiring consensus, a ‘super-majority’, or the absence of a veto (etc.) before change can be achieved. In other words, this study treats the institutional advantages enjoyed by antipreneurs as ‘power-multipliers’ while still acknowledging entrepreneurs may at times prevail in the face of determined resistance, even from relatively powerful actors.⁹⁴

Drawing an entrepreneurs/antipreneurs distinction therefore usefully highlights the potential strategic and tactical advantages the latter might enjoy. But the words ‘might’ and ‘potential’ are important; not all antipreneurs in all issue-areas will enjoy all these advantages. Instead, context matters: some strategies and tactics will be available in certain circumstances and not in others. We have just seen how the degree to which a norm is entrenched or institutionalised matters; the next section considers the importance of paying attention to temporal contextual factors as well.

The temporal context and ‘windows of opportunity’

In 2012, Carmen Wunderlich noted that to successfully diffuse a new norm entrepreneurs must watch for and exploit ‘crisis situations … upset[ting] the international order … [which] pave the way for the establishment of new or the remodelling of existing norms’. She also noted new norms can arise following ‘transformations in the international distribution of power’.⁹⁵ In other words, ‘windows of opportunity’ for entrepreneurs open when specific crises⁹⁶ and/or structural shifts⁹⁷ occur. This study argues that antipreneurs are equally able to exploit the windows of opportunity created by crises and/or structural shifts (including shifts in ‘wider’ discursive/normative structures). Thus norm dynamics studies of the sort envisaged herein must be sensitive to the temporal context in which a particular norm contestation cycle is taking place. Events that are only distantly related to the debate surrounding substantive merits of a norm may profoundly affect the roles that actors play and the strategies and tactics they employ. Further examination of the whaling and R2P issue-areas is illustrative.

Regarding whaling, several temporal contextual structural shifts affected the dynamics of the contestation cycles on either side of the 1982 moratorium. The first is technology, namely, a series of industrial advances has steadily reduced demand for whaling products. These began as early as the 1820s when rapeseed oil began replacing whale oil in textile manufacturing, but they accelerated in the mid-twentieth century with advances in industrial chemistry. At the same time, increases in the efficiency of whaling technology – especially larger factory ships – meant that whale oil remained relatively competitive as a commodity; but it was no longer essential.⁹⁸ Technological innovations cannot be reversed so their combined contextual effect was (and is) substantially the same during both contestation cycles, namely, before 1982 whale products were steadily becoming less essential and since then there has been no strong commercial imperative to begin whaling again (although a new innovation which ‘absolutely requires’ whale oil to work or be efficient cannot be ruled out).

Therefore the second and third – and most important – temporal contextual factors have been the health of whale stocks and the rise of wider environmentalist discourses. The first has had (and arguably continues to have) very different effects during each norm contestation cycle. Because industrial whaling was causing the whale stocks to plummet rapidly in the 1970s, the viability of the whole industry was threatened,⁹⁹ which created a window of opportunity before 1982 for anti-whaling entrepreneurs because even pro-whaling antipreneurs recognised the need for stringent quotas. But the anti-whaling entrepreneurs also supplemented these propitious ‘material’ circumstances by ‘articulating’ or grafting the anti-whaling norm onto the contemporaneous rise of environmentalist concerns, especially in powerful Western states.¹⁰⁰

Now that many whale stocks have substantially recovered,¹⁰¹ the imperative to protect whales (or perhaps just some species) has declined somewhat in the current post-1982 contestation cycle. And a more generalised ‘discourse of self-definition’ has arisen, sometimes expressed as indignation over Westerners ‘making dietary decisions for the rest of the world’.¹⁰² Other non-Western states also now dispute the whaling ban not on its merits per se but to prevent Western states dictating how they exploit other natural resources.¹⁰³ Yet environmental-protection discourses are still strong and have arguably strengthened in this age of global warming. Determining whether a sufficient window of opportunity for pro-whaling entrepreneurs to substantially advance their case has now opened is beyond the scope of this article. What is clear is that shifts in material and discursive structures affect the roles actors play in discrete cycles of a particular norm contestation process, and how they play them.

Examining the recent history of the R2P norm serves to illustrate how crises also affect discrete norm contestation cycles. The most salient example is NATO’s 2011 intervention in Libya. At the outset, arguably the norm entrepreneurs were afforded an opportunity to implement R2P, especially its most controversial element, Pillar III, which envisages armed interventions in sovereign states to prevent human rights abuses.¹⁰⁴ The threats Libya’s dictator Colonel Muammar Gaddafi issued against the rebellious citizens of Benghazi as his armoured columns approached the city in mid-March 2011¹⁰⁵ created panic in international circles, drawing parallels with Rwanda in 1994.¹⁰⁶ This had a dual effect: Gaddafi’s threats taunted R2P-entrepreneur-states, suggesting the norm’s credibility was at stake and that ‘something must be done’; and it made it difficult for other international actors – some of them R2P-antipreneurs, some just sceptical fence-sitters – to oppose the call for intervention.¹⁰⁷ The Security Council passed Resolution 1973 on 17 March 2011 and six months later, Gaddafi’s regime crumbled, leading many prominent R2P entrepreneurs to celebrate what they thought was a decisive precedent in support of R2P (a ‘textbook case of the R2P norm working exactly as it was supposed to’, as Gareth Evans put it).¹⁰⁸

But their triumphalism ebbed steadily thereafter. Unease ratcheted up after Gaddafi was summarily executed by a frenzied mob in October 2011. And then chaos followed: the US Ambassador was murdered by Islamists in 2012; other Islamists empowered by the Libyan war almost overran Mali and were only defeated by a French-led (consensual) intervention; by 2015 a succession of unstable governments in Tripoli had come and gone, rival militias had fought over and destroyed Tripoli’s airport, and Egypt had carried out airstrikes after Islamic State-aligned Islamists summarily executed 21 Copts. The Libyan intervention and its aftermath have therefore become a lightning rod for antipreneurial resistance to R2P, especially to its Pillar III component. Over a dozen states alleged NATO abused R2P,¹⁰⁹ and Adrian Johnson and Saqeb Mueen concluded in January 2012 – well before the anarchical chaos inside Libya had manifested itself fully – that

the manner in which [Resolution 1973] was contorted out of all recognition from the protection of civilians to, in effect, outright regime change has left a sour taste in the mouths of powers like China, Russia and India who still hold an absolute conception of state sovereignty. For advocates of the R2P, the worry should be that there is indeed a legacy of the Libya conflict: China and Russia will presume that the model in future operations is rather regime change under the cloak of R2P, and will be more forthcoming with vetoes. We have already seen this over Syria.¹¹⁰

Largely as a consequence of what occurred in Libya¹¹¹ there has been no non-consensual¹¹² intervention in Syria despite the death toll exceeding 200,000 as 2014 ended. Obviously the fact a Pillar III intervention must be authorised by the Security Council enables antipreneurs like Russia and China,¹¹³ who have long been sceptical of Pillar III, to exercise an especially powerful blocking tactic by using their veto. Yet the Libyan controversy has offered other actors who arguably ‘believe in’ the R2P norm – or at least the need for some sort of norm to guide the protection of vulnerable populations – the opportunity to offer proposals for refining R2P. The prime example, of course, is the Responsibility while Protecting proposal tabled by Brazil in September 2011.¹¹⁴ The ferocity of the ‘pushback’ reportedly ‘surprised’ Brazil and it ultimately declined to follow through.¹¹⁵ But this incident nevertheless demonstrates that actors other than just ‘pure’ entrepreneurs and antipreneurs engage in norm contestation processes; in this case Brazil played the ‘competitor entrepreneur’ role.

A string of metaphorical obituaries for the R2P norm have begun to appear in recent years.¹¹⁶ Again, this is not the place to determine whether they are right or not, other than to say that more windows of opportunity will likely open again for R2P entrepreneurs every time a state commits a mass atrocity crime. Whether they will seize them effectively – by, say, not pursuing regime change from the outset¹¹⁷ – is another matter. Wunderlich stressed that entrepreneurs may fail to grasp the opportunities presented to them,¹¹⁸ and obviously the same applies to antipreneurs. The broader point is, however, much clearer. The temporal context of crises creates windows of opportunities for both entrepreneurs and antipreneurs to advance their position if they have the skill to seize them.

Having now explored the strategic and tactical advantages antipreneurs may enjoy, and after having explained how contextual factors affect the dynamics of particular norm contestation cycles and the roles actors play (and how they play them), the next and penultimate section presents the norm dynamics role-spectrum.

The norm dynamics roles-spectrum

Given there are cases in which a distinct role for antipreneurs should be recognised, the next logical step is to create a typology of roles which actors may play in particular cycles of discrete norm contestation processes. The simplest way is to conceptualise a role-spectrum. The notion originally comes from Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn, who examined ‘normative struggle in global financial governance’ after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) began in 2008. He found this crisis caused the rise of

a host of civil society organizations … to challenge norms of financial self-government … [like] Occupy Wall Street… [who] vocally criticiz[ed] the failings of market-based governance and advocat[ed] shifts in standards of global financial governance away from reliance on private market self-regulation.

These entrepreneurs – which soon included powerful actors like France and the G20 – met antipreneurial resistance. Some powerful actors like global banks chose the path of outright resistance by deploying ‘vocal scaremongering strategies’ and lavish lobbying of and campaign-donations to political parties, but others ‘exercised agency in more subtle manners’.¹¹⁹ Specifically, professional service entities like accounting firms, credit rating agencies, and media corporations creatively resisted, including by promoting ‘moral’ religious and environmental financial instruments.¹²⁰ And this mix of strategies (including the outright antipreneurial resistance) substantially worked because ‘the sum of the reforms … tweaked rather than more fundamentally shifted from norms of market-based financial governance’.¹²¹ Campbell-Verduyn went on to argue that

categories of ‘norm entrepreneurs’ and ‘norm anti-preneurs’ can best be conceived of as ideal types. Overemphasis on either rival category risks overlooking forms of agency falling at different points on a continuum between each extreme.¹²²

While he did not theorise about how contextual factors affected discrete cycles of the norm contestation process, he did note that the collapse of the Bretton Woods system and widespread stagflation in the 1970s provided the free-market entrepreneurs an opportunity to advance their cause.¹²³ And they enjoyed substantial advantages when defending the subsequent free market status quo (the ‘Washington Consensus’) given most developed states enjoyed decades of sustained economic growth after 1980. These pro-market actors could therefore play something very close to the ‘pure’ antipreneur role, effectively resisting pro-regulation entrepreneurs’ efforts to achieve change.¹²⁴ But this ended with the GFC: in the new norm contestation cycle a window of opportunity opened for pro-regulation entrepreneurs to advance their agenda, and some anti-regulation antipreneurs switched to creative resistance mode. Empirically speaking, it is not clear whether they were, in effect, tactically retreating to win the overall war or if they sincerely believed some (but minimal) change was necessary: Campbell-Verduyn’s analysis suggests both motives were at play but further research may show one predominated.

It was noted at the outset that ‘traces of the norm antipreneur concept – and of the other roles actors may adopt, and so therefore the role-spectrum too – are already seeded throughout the norm dynamics literature’. Starting at the far left (see Figure 1) are the ‘pure entrepreneurs’ introduced by the early wave of norm dynamics studies. They all essentially ‘pull in the same direction’; they are from the same normative community, they are committed to change, and they substantially agree on the content of the norm that should be promoted to achieve it. Closer to the centre we find the ‘competitor entrepreneur’ role; studied by Wiener and her fellow travellers (and perhaps in Acharya’s norm circulation model too), this role is populated by actors from substantially the same normative community, and they agree on the need for change but differ on the exact scope and content of the new norm. These roles are already reasonably well-developed in the norm dynamics literature.

Figure 1 The norm dynamics role-spectrum

The current under-appreciated roles are on the right of the spectrum. On the far right sit the ‘pure antipreneurs’. They can be glimpsed in existing studies, especially in Payne’s research and also in Acharya’s norm localisation and especially his norm subsidiarity model. They are from a radically different normative community to the entrepreneurs, they reject the need for change, and so they resist implacably. With the addition of Campbell-Verduyn’s ‘creative resisters’ (and note that similar actors appear in Acharya’s norm subsidiarity model), the final piece of the puzzle falls into place. This role sits closer to the centre, and actors playing it are not from the same normative community as the entrepreneurs, but perhaps because they are forced by circumstance or maybe because they have been partially persuaded by the entrepreneurs they concede that some (minimal) change is acceptable or necessary. Accordingly, they yield some ground while still essentially defending the status quo.

This typology substantially omits Bob’s rival entrepreneurs. They are tentatively placed in the middle for two related reasons; first, his model is a ‘holistic’ one which does not break norm contestation into discrete cycles, and second, he did not examine cases of heavily-institutionalised norms. This makes it difficult to know exactly where his rival entrepreneurs sit on a spectrum defined by determination to achieve or resist normative change. Perhaps his model simply has to be seen as existing ‘in parallel’, as one which applies to a particular class of cases or which should be deployed when a scholar’s purpose is to study normative contestation in an issue-area holistically not cyclically.

In presenting the norm dynamics role-spectrum, this section largely completes the presentation of the argument for when and how we can recognise a distinct antipreneur role in certain norm contestation processes. The final section explores why we should do so.

Conclusion: The utility of recognising norm antipreneurs

Recognising an antipreneur role sharply distinguished from the better-known entrepreneur promises to yield two sorts of conceptual or theoretical benefits. The first are narrow benefits in the sense that the norm dynamics role-spectrum clarifies what sort of roles we might see actors playing in particular norm contestation contexts, enabling scholars to draw and then test hypotheses on the sorts of interactional dynamics that characterise the cases they study. The second are wider benefits in that recognising the presence of antipreneurs draws scholars’ attention to currently understudied cases which, if they are studied, promises to begin the wider collective task of correcting imbalances in the norm dynamics literature.

Regarding the first or narrow benefits, by recognising the sorts of roles one typically sees actors playing in norm contestation contexts scholars can study cases more systematically. For example, a scholar could start with examining the context in which norm contestation in a discrete cycle of a particular issue-areas is taking place, and then hypothesise about what sorts of actors may be ‘out there waiting to be found’. If it is found that there is a heavily entrenched status quo then this suggests antipreneurs will enjoy a number of tactical and strategic advantages and that normative change is unlikely, or at least the scholar can better understand what sorts of strategies and tactics are available to the entrepreneurs (or which are likely to be more/less effective). But perhaps it is found that a crisis is breaking out or a structural shift is accelerating, upsetting the long-entrenched normative status quo – in other words, windows of opportunity are opening for entrepreneurs – thereby putting the defenders of the status quo on the defensive. This may in turn mean the scholar should look for evidence the resisters are being forced to shift from their preferred antipreneur role and into creative resister mode. Or maybe an initial examination of the context suggests that there is no entrenched normative status quo, meaning Bob’s ‘rival entrepreneur’ model is a better one to inform the study.

Alternatively, future norm dynamics studies¹²⁵ might initially focus on the actors, especially if their intentions can be readily determined. For example, attention to the strategies and tactics one actor is deploying might indicate clearly what their intent is, and so what sort of role they are playing and, from there, what roles other actors are likely to play in response. This may in turn enable the scholar to begin deciding ‘what sort of case’ is being examined and to hypothesise about ‘what sort of outcome is likely’. Preliminary investigations may reveal several competitor entrepreneurs present who all agree change is necessary but who disagree on the content of the new norm, which would imply that a Wiener-like ‘contestation within a normative community’model should be applied. Or maybe pure antipreneurs are implacably resisting pure entrepreneurs, suggesting Acharya’s norm subsidiarity model should be deployed; the scholar may therefore decide to search for evidence that both sides were girding for a fight to the death. But if a few creative resisters are found lurking in the resisters’ camp this could suggest a compromise solution – but one favouring the status quo – might be possible (that is, suggesting Acharya’s localisation model might be most appropriate). The norm dynamics role-spectrum would therefore be deployed at the outset of a study to pose hypotheses and to structure the subsequent gathering of empirical evidence.

The point is that recognising the antipreneur role both opens up conceptual spaces to begin analyses of specific norm dynamics processes, and also might even provide the means to work towards a sort of ‘macro-typology’ indicating which of the various process-focused models currently vying for prominence should be deployed in which circumstances. This leads to discussion of the second or wider benefit: recognising antipreneurs as a distinct role inherently alerts scholars to the possibility of efforts to change norms might fail, drawing attention to cases that are currently overlooked. After all, ‘no normative change’ in an issue area is a significant outcome in itself, even if it is not as noticeable as instances of normative change tend to be.

In this way, scholars could collectively work towards eliminating the selection bias which has marred the norm dynamics literature. For example, conceptualising antipreneurs as a sort of ‘neutral-descriptive category’ of actors who deploy particular types of strategies and tactics in certain contexts means recognising that all actors can play the antipreneur role. Such an insight would help correct the liberal bias that has permeated the norm dynamics literature: it suggests scholars might find, and so should look for and examine, cases of non-Western actors resisting Western actors’ efforts to promote illiberal norms. In other words, some types of change are not ‘inherently good’ and, indeed, sometimes resistance can be ‘enlightened’. And future research which is sensitive to insights like this ultimately promises to better illuminate the deeper, more fundamental, contextually-contingent processes by which the international system changes – and how it doesn’t – as actors contest against one another in particular normative contexts.