| Summary: | This dissertation draws on pragmatist thought to develop a novel explanation for norm change in international politics. Specifically, concepts derived from pragmatism help explain how the creative recombination of practices by actors in response to changes in the material and social context of action can transform largely tacit notions of appropriate behavior. Not only does the unique perspective of pragmatism provide insight into processes of norm change that more common approaches - such as those emphasizing social mobilization or socialization by institutions - cannot explain, it also provides an account for the emergence of new norms, a process often disregarded in the broader literature. I illustrate the relevance of the framework by using it to shed light on a central, yet largely ignored, normative development in international politics.
In the wake of the Second World War, policymakers developed the novel practice in which a state might maintain a long-term, peacetime military presence on the territory of another sovereign state without resort to coercion or usurpation of the host's ability to independently formulate policy. Such basing arrangements, previously unthinkable and at odds with the historical, inherited understanding of sovereignty, are now central to many aspects of contemporary security politics. The disruption of inherited understandings of appropriate action in the face of radical changes in the context of security politics precipitated a process of deliberation and policy experimentation among policymakers that resulted in the development of new security practices, changing the bounds of what had been the largely taken for granted limits of legitimate state action and resulting in a new conception of sovereignty. This dissertation provides the first theoretical explanation for the development of this basing practice and the changes in the norm of sovereignty required to accommodate it, an oversight that is due in part to the inadequacy of the tools currently available for explaining norm change in international politics. The general framework developed here is also not limited to the specific case in question, but may be applied to instances of norm change that meet the scope conditions of the argument.
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