Description
Bureaucracies, and their bureaucrats, develop expertise as they act upon the world and create a cultural disposition towards behaviour. They are increasingly contesting international obligations and perform this in a subtle way. It is not a question of developing new norms, but how new behaviours, that are slight deviations from the normal course, progressively convert into an ordinary action. From the inside, the drifting away from standards might become invisible, and deviations become compliant behaviour. Keys to this process are the signals through which the ‘potential danger’ is rationalised. This ‘normalisation of deviance’ is an interesting matter that asks an insight. Contradictions in the liberal international order were pointed out by scholars early on. Less was provided on how bureaucrats’ contention defends their deviations. Drawing from Adler-Nissen’s sociology of knowledge, this paper questions how bureaucrats’ inconsistency with international obligations is normalised. Recent cases of contestation of the International Criminal Court issuing arrest warrants help answering the question. The paper leads to three major findings: first, bureaucrats promote understandings of situations as normal when they are faced with increasing evidence that something is going wrong; second, transgression has the power of attraction; and third, contention and ambiguity are instruments leading to the normalisation of deviance.
Key words: deviance, ambiguity, normalisation, International Criminal Court, Israel, Italy
