Norm Collisions in Global Politics: Drugs, Organs, GMOs

Constructivist norms research in the last decade has largely focused on questions of norm contestation and norm application. Legal approaches focusing on regime complexity and fragmentation have dealt with questions of overlapping legal orders and possible solutions and responses. This article bridges these two approaches to describe and analyse an empirical phenomenon, namely norm collisions, in which a collision between two or more norms is received by actors as problematic. Following a brief theoretical discussion about norm collisions, the paper then maps norm collisions in a variety of policy fields: drug control and use, organ trafficking, and trade with Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs). Based on this mapping we develop a typology of norm collisions. We use a theoretical framework that draws on critical constructivism, regime complexity literature, and fragmentation literature. In order to identify norm collisions we rely on quantitative text analysis as well as discourse analysis and reconstructive approaches. We demonstrate that through such an analysis gain a deeper understanding of this emerging phenomenon and can provide a first attempt in explaining under which conditions norm collisions become activated by actors.