Session 18: Be the Change

            “Be the change you wish to see in the world”- Gandhi

The article “International Norms dynamics and Political change”, by Finnmore and Sikkink talks about norms, their origins and evolutions. In the article, the authors also examine how norms develop and though, while many may not fully understand them, still abide by them.

            The authors use the model, what they call “Norm Life Cycle”, to explain how norms come into existence and how they spread throughout the international arena of politics to become forever embedded into the system of international politics. The first stage of this model is the “Norm emergence”. Unlike much of the norms we encounter in our daily lives, the norms that make it up to the international arena are created for a designated purpose with a specific agenda, i.e. they are not coherently built into the society that individuals follow without question instead they are invented. The second phase of the model is called “Norm Cascading”. This phase introduces the norms developed within a state to the sphere of international politics. It is here that states either accept or reject novel norms. It can be observed that in this phase states flock together with other states that they may idolize or be dependently allied to and accept the norms that those states propose or agree upon. The third and final stage is the internalization of norms. This phase highlights how norms that might have originated in a geographically distant state trickle down into the lives of individuals locally.

            This is a really interesting phenomenon. When observed in slight detail it makes a plausible link between how the study of international politics and states is not different from a group of individuals in a community. One individual in a society might start a practice that he/she thinks highly of, such as charity. Soon others around him/her might engage in it for reasons such as personal satisfaction or simply for humanitarian reasons. Over time and generations everybody in that community might be doing the same simple act without ever realizing how it started and what implications it had over them as a society. A norm will establish. Hence, it cannot be completely rejected that the study of political science is fundamentally the study of human nature, locally or internationally.