Contesting and Shaping International Norms: The Neglected Side of Autocracy Promotion

Following a wave of research on external democracy promotion in the 1990s and 2000s, scholars have recently begun to investigate how autocracies resist Western-led democratization efforts and promote autocratic regimes abroad. The analytical focus of research on democracy and autocracy promotion is thereby exclusively on domestic actors, rules, and norms. This focus is unsurprising, taking into account that scholars working on democracy/autocracy promotion are squarely placed in the field of Comparative Politics. Yet their focus is somewhat narrow. For they ignore that both democracies and autocracies might not just attempt to shape domestic institutions but also international norms. Until recently, Western democracies have dominated the political processes and discourses in the international arena that shape our understanding about the ways states ought to interact with each other. This predominant position in shaping international norms has provided added legitimacy for democracies’ foreign policies. Recently, powerful autocratic regimes such as China and Russia have seemingly challenged democracies, emerging as potential contesters of international norms. If they succeeded, autocracies would effectively challenge the normative power of Western democracies in world politics. Yet can autocracies plausibly contest international norms? Scholars working in the field of International Relations have their doubts. For many, norms are supposedly “good)” (i.e., liberal). They emanate from the West and diffuse to the rest. Yet the standard definitions of norms are unbiased. Moreover, norms’ origins can theoretically lie anywhere in the world. It is therefore quite plausible that autocracies might effectively contest international norms. This paper starts from this premise. Our case study is Russia’s ideational justification for its incursion into Ukraine. We ask whether Russia’s claim that it engaged in a humanitarian intervention is more than a petty attempt to disguise pure power politics. Is Russia maybe contesting Western understandings of humanitarian interventions, trying to reshape our ideas about when and how countries can intervene in other countries to protect vulnerable populations? We also try to assess the degree to which countries around the world are susceptible to Russia’s norm contestation. We answer these questions by tracking the global discourse among top government officials in Russia and two-dozen other countries and international organizations in the wake of Crimea’s annexation, applying qualitative data analysis through the use of Atlas.ti. Our initial findings show that Russia is indeed contesting international norms of humanitarian intervention. It appears that at least this autocracy is in the business of not just contesting domestic regime norms but also norms of international relations.