Re-Centring International Relations: Studying Norms 'from Below'

On ESRAH Working Papers ESRAH Working Papers Series welcomes papers on all aspects connected with the hub’s research focus and gives authors a chance to increase the circulation, visibility, and impact of their research. The Working Papers and Student Papers present results from ongoing and cutting-edge research at ESRAH and partner institutions. Its topics and key aspects reflect the various disciplines involved in the hub. Some of the working papers will be published in a scientific journal at a later date or serve to publish (preliminary) results quickly and up-to-date. Replication studies are also appreciated. Abstract of Current Paper International Relations (IR) has long been dominated by approaches that favour studying government entities, diplomats, or international institutions over local, everyday contexts. This working paper suggests building on work initiated by Feminist scholarship in the 1990s that sought to re-centre IR towards the everyday based on the feminist dictum ‘the personal is political’. To illustrate the benefit of this proposition, this paper uses IR norms research as an example of promising research for a more general project of re-centring IR ‘from below’. The paper suggests that, here, an extension of practice-based critical norms research with reference to practice theory as well as Social Movement Studies helps in studying how norm contestation unfolds. Grounded Normative Theory (GNT) and praxiography serve as methodological underpinnings for illustrative case studies which focus on Feminist Global Politics (FGP). As we argue, FGP facilitates a particularly fruitful perspective for the project of re-centring IR. We illustrate the project with three case studies: first, the interplay between activists and governments on Feminist Foreign Policy; second, feminist activism against nuclear weapons; and, third, inter-feminist contestations in Ukraine following the full-scale invasion by Russia as case studies. With that, we hope to invite and inspire new research on re-centring IR to studying it ‘from below’. Website https://www.esrah.uni-hamburg.de/