Description
In this paper, I ask: how do international norms erode? And in particular, how do they get hollowed out whilst remaining in place? I focus on two norms of global politics and trace their different modalities of hollowing out: the norm entailing the duty to search and rescue people at sea and the norm prohibiting the domestic use of the military. Blending discursive institutionalism with meaning-making, I argue that norms become hollowed out through seemingly benign discourses of normalisation pushed forward by antipreneurs- norm entrepreneurs aiming to dismantle these norms. Adopting an abductive approach, I trace the erosion of these norms over time, combining quantitative and ethnographic methods to study norms hollowing out in the central Mediterranean route (for the search and rescue norm) and Western Europe (for the norm prohibiting the domestic use of the military).
