Navnita Chadha Behera (Delhi University) The Long Arc of Debating Norms: an Ideal, an Instrument or an Episteme?

Norms hold a paradoxical position in the disciplinary debates of IR. While the core normative concepts of reason, liberty, human rights and sovereignty constitute the foundational bedrock of post-Second World War, liberal world order but in practice, they have long been reckoned for their instrumental value primarily in the service of realpolitik. This is mainly because the positivist philosophy has long held that objective analysis of any social inquiry is possible, indeed necessary, without any consideration of normative values. Even though the post-positivist scholarship has sought to make amends by foregrounding their knowledge claims about the role and value of norms in historical and sociological contexts, this long-standing  debate has, however, fought shy of seriously interrogating the deeply embedded Eurocentrism in their metaphysical and meta-theoretical assumptions. A way forward, I argue, involves first understanding the ontological—atomistic and relational—registers, as in, the fundamental existential commitments of the social knowledge structures of IR. From this vantage point, the positivist and the post-positivist analyses of norms figure on the same side of the continuum of atomistic ontological registers wherein the former remains foundationally committed to several tiers of separations, say between facts and values; social and political spheres and, internal and external domains while the latter holds on to principled differentiation between theory and practice or, knowing and doing/practicing norms. The relational ways of life, on the other hand, open up a radically different possibility of viewing, understanding and practicing existence—the domain of ‘what is’— in an intrinsically ethical way because in this worldview knowing, doing and being are inherently connected and work together in co-creating our realities . I draw upon varying conceptions of relational cosmologies that are practiced across the globe such as dharma, din, Buddhism, Ubuntu, Confucianism, along with the cosmovisions of certain indigenous communities who practice existence based on deeply relational assumptions.

This lecture is organized in cooperation with the CSS working group “Doing theory”, the Chair of Political Science, especially Global Governance (Professor Antje Wiener), and the German Political Science Association thematic network “IR norms research”.