Ordering Through Affirmation and Contestation: A Multi-Level Perspective on Global Security Regimes

Global security regimes such as the nuclear nonproliferation regime or the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) are characterized by and based on concepts of order which themselves represent alternatives to the anarchic structure of the international state system. Such orders aim at the establishment of mutual expectations of reliability, stability and the containment of violence. The underlying norms are usually enforced by power resources or through a certain belief in the legitimacy of the order at hand. In this paper, we conceptualize orders as consisting of four dimensions: coercive power, institutions, norms, and social practices. The meaning and durability of orders is subject to inherent contestation. This is especially true for the current historic situation in which hegemonic stability which had long been decisive for regime creation has been replaced by plurality and multipolarity. So far, the change of orders has been dealt with largely at the macro-level. In the realm of International Relations (IR), neo-realists have discussed challenges to hegemonic order-building in the context of the rise and fall of great powers, neo-institutionalists have analyzed the possibilities of transferring hegemonic stability into horizontal modes of cooperation by means of regime creation. Approaches to Global Governance, in turn, have focused on the multilateralization and democratization of international politics. In contrast, this paper introduces a new perspective by focusing on processes of “ordering”: In particular, we seek to expand the dominant IR focus by including the meso- and micro-level. Therfore, we analyze how a broad variety of stakeholders challenge normative meanings, seek to instantiate new practices and thus engage in “ordering”. Such processes may either occur through the affirmation or contestation of existing notions of order. For illustrative purposes the paper turns to the nuclear non-proliferation regime which has been subject to affirmative and contestatory ordering from its very beginning. While the regime has long been approached primarily as an example of top-down, state-centric ordering, the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons serves to illustrate how civil society actors engage in ordering processes and seek to engender change “from below”. In the context of the second example, the emerging R2P norm cluster, the crisis of responsibility on the global level has encouraged regional players, such as ECOWAS, to engage in ordering processes on the meso-level as well. Micro-level ordering is discussed referring to two examples: Brazil’s initiative to instantiate a Responsibility while Protecting (RwP) gives witness to a middle power initiative from the Global South that was based on both affirmation and contestation; the recent framework on a Right to Assist (RtoA) as proposed by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC) serves to illustrate ordering “from below”.