In media and scholarly accounts in IR and beyond, questions around stability and change in national and global politics hinge on conceptions of what is normal. The spread of right-wing populism, the existential threat of climate change, and rising concerns about the unraveling of the rules-based liberal world order have raised questions around changing conceptions of normal. Yet, as Gëzim Visoka and Nicolas Lemay-Hébert keenly show, the crucially salient concept of normalcy remains, rather puzzlingly, undertheorized in IR. In their excellent new book, Normalization in World Politics, Visoka and Lemay-Hébert take this limitation head-on to theorize normalcy and to problematize and map the varied ways that states and organizations attempt to (re)assert it in global politics.
Normalization in World Politics centers on big questions around recurrent claims to normalcy made by major states and international organizations. The authors ask, “How can we make sense of these invocations of normalcy?” (p. 2), and they seek to explore what work these invocations do in global politics. To these ends, Visoka and Lemay-Hébert critically map the varied discursive and practical means by which states and international organizations make claims as to what is (ab)normal as means of affecting order-making in global politics. More specifically, the authors center attention on various state-led interventions grounded in a common “will to normalize” (pp. 4, 152). Through a conceptually innovative investigation resting on rich critical discourse analysis, the authors highlight three broad situations—imposing, restoring, or accepting normalcy—by which actors establish or contest some version of normal and thereby enforce or reinforce a hierarchy of power and domination in global politics.
To develop their account, Visoka and Lemay-Hébert start from Foucault and adopt a relational lens, understanding there to be no singular conception of normal: instead, it is made up of context-specific, contingent, and, thus, contested claims by social agents. As the authors show in some detail, normalcy is also a contested concept across literatures (p. 33). However, they offer a productive account centered on how discursive claims of normalcy or acts of normalization construct what is abnormal and enforce existing or impose new ways of knowing or doing as normal. The authors unearth and systematize three prominent technologies of normalization: liberal interventionism, resilience and disaster management, and confessionary practices. These practices, adopted by states and organizations alike, correspond to the imposition, restoration, or acceptance of normalcy (pp. 9, 40).
The book is structured around this three-part theorization of the practices of normalization. After an introduction, in chapter 2 the authors develop their theoretical account. They detail the descriptive and prescriptive dynamics of laying claims to and practicing “normal” across major accounts in social and political theory. They take Foucault and his three figures of abnormal as the starting point to make sense of how certain states and organizations engage in varied discourses and practices of normalization (p. 37). After some conceptual scaffolding, Visoka and Lemay-Hébert articulate their own account, which centers on the categorization of states as fragile or failed, disaster affected, and suppressive, and the corresponding categories of normalization discourse and practice—imposition, restoration, and acceptance—that rely on varied normalization technologies: liberal interventionism, disaster management, and confessionary practices (p. 40).
In chapters 3–5, Visoka and Lemay-Hébert apply this three-part analytical approach to three broad cases or “clusters of normalization discourses in world politics” around imposed, restored, and accepted normalcy (p. 16). Chapter 3 centers on externally imposed normalcy on fragile or failed states: the “prototypical monsters” of the Western-dominated international community that deify expectations of normalcy based on contingent conceptions of a rules-based international order (p. 55). Here, the authors detail the implicit knowledge that makes possible varied practices within liberal interventionism, including dynamics of peacebuilding and state-building across cases of so-called failed and fragile states that are deemed to be outside the laws of nature and politics. These include Somalia, Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Timor-Leste, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
Chapter 4 centers discourses and practices around “restoring normalcy” through varied natural disaster management interventions that are designed to bring about either a return to normalcy or promote a new normal (p. 98). Visoka and Lemay-Hébert center attention on the Philippines after Typhoon Haiyan or Yolanda in 2013, the United States after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and Haiti after the 2010 earthquake—and the logic and efforts by international and local actors to “build back better” a new normal in the wake of each disaster (p. 104). Chapter 5 centers on the third set of discourses and practices of normalization: accepting the normalcy of states that are anomalous to conceptions of normalcy and that have been labeled suppressive or in breach of established norms around human rights. Cases include Bahrain after the brief spread of the Arab Spring protest movement in 2011 and Myanmar after violence against the Rohingya minority in Rakhine State since 2012. As the authors show, both states experienced “restraint and lite interventionism” (p. 148) from the international community through varied commissions of inquiry. These confessionary practices served to “simultaneously retain international acceptance and forge a sense of self-transformation” (p. 136). The final chapter, chapter 6, concludes the book.
Normalization in World Politics is well written, logically structured, methodologically aware, and concise at 167 pages of body text. Methodologically, the authors present a keen and persuasive account of Foucauldian discourse analysis and problematization designed to question and then “trace representative and illustrative discursive practices across a wide range of cases and spatial formations” by drawing on a set of canonical academic and policy texts as “events” that “structure the discourse on normalcy” (pp. 49–51). Here, some readers may wish for more detail—in an appendix, perhaps—both about how texts were selected and how their salience to the intention and understanding of actors is attributed.
More broadly, the authors’ theorization and analysis offer valuable contributions and will appeal to an array of scholars and scholarship. The book is in dialogue with growing work on the relationship between norms and practice in accounting for both stability and change in global governance. A key contribution here is in theorizing and exploring international (normalizing) interventions by states and organizations in a holistic and multifaceted way and in articulating the shifting terrain of justifications over time. The authors show that interventions comprise an array of discursive and practical acts and varied actors, from states and organizations involved in military intervention to civil society and aid campaigns to local businesses and media. Together, interventions not only impose, restore, or accept a contingent understanding of normalcy, as they vividly show in the empirical chapters, but also (re)create wider hierarchies of power and domination between states and societies (p. 53). Moreover, they tend to shift and evolve in their justifications over time, from narrow aspects of democratic governance, human rights, or the liberal peace to broader conceptions of rendering states “functioning and responsible” (p. 87).
The imposition of normalcy and the adoption of the discourse of normalization to justify intervention in fragile or failed states, like Somalia or Iraq, as the authors show, were not motivated exclusively by an interest in spreading liberal peace. Rather, they were animated by assumptions around the responsibilities of states atop a hierarchical international pecking order to both recognize and respond to the abnormal. These interventions, then, reinforce some states and the “West” as normal and reaffirm their ontological security by legitimizing a hierarchical set of relations and the rules, norms, status, and privileges that come along with it (pp. 71–72).
Normalization in World Politics is a conceptually rich and compelling book that presents a novel and engaged theory of normalization. It will be of interest to scholars across the discipline for some time to come.
