Show Time Fujii, Lee Ann; Finnemore, Martha; Wood, Elisabeth Jean
2021, 2021-09-15
eBook
In Show Time, Lee Ann Fujii asks why some perpetrators of political violence, from lynch mobs to genocidal killers, display their acts of violence so publicly and extravagantly. Closely examining ...three horrific and extreme episodes—the murder of a prominent Tutsi family amidst the genocide in Rwanda, the execution of Muslim men in a Serb-controlled village in Bosnia during the Balkan Wars, and the lynching of a twenty-two-year old Black farmhand on Maryland's Eastern Shore in 1933—Fujii shows how "violent displays" are staged to not merely to kill those perceived to be enemies or threats, but also to affect and influence observers, neighbors, and the larger society. Watching and participating in these violent displays profoundly transforms those involved, reinforcing political identities, social hierarchies, and power structures. Such public spectacles of violence also force members of the community to choose sides—openly show support for the goals of the violence, or risk becoming victims, themselves. Tracing the ways in which public displays of violence unfold, Show Time reveals how the perpetrators exploit the fluidity of social ties for their own ends.
On February 16, 2016, a U.S. court ordered Apple to circumvent the security features of an iPhone 5C used by one of the terrorists who committed the San Bernardino shootings. Apple refused. It argued ...that breaking encryption for one phone could not be done without undermining the security of encryption more generally. It made a public appeal for “everyone to step back and consider the implications” of having a “back door” key to unlock any phone—which governments (and others) could deploy to track users or access their data. The U.S. government eventually withdrew its suit after the F.B.I. hired an outside party to access the phone. But the incident sparked a wide-ranging debate over the appropriate standards of behavior for companies like Apple and for their customers in constructing and using information and communication technologies (ICTs). That debate, in turn, is part of a much larger conversation. Essential as the Internet is, “rules of the road” for cyberspace are often unclear and have become the focus of serious conflicts.
Abstract
Accusations of bad state behaviour in cyberspace are proliferating, yet this increase in naming has not obviously produced much shame. Accused states uniformly deny the accusation or decline ...to comment, without changing behaviour. For international lawyers, the problem is compounded by the absence of international law in these charges. States are not invoking international law when they complain of other states’ behaviour, suggesting the law is weak – or worse, irrelevant – in holding states accountable for their cyber operations. In lieu of ‘naming and shaming’, we introduce and examine the broader concept of ‘accusation’ as a social, political and legal practice with diverse uses in cyberspace and beyond. Accusers must make strategic choices about how they frame their accusations, and we unpack various elements accusers may manipulate to their advantage. Accusations also have many purposes. They may seek to ‘name and shame’ an accused into conforming to certain behavioural expectations, but they may also aim at defensive or deterrent effects on both the accused and, crucially, on third parties. Particularly important, accusations may play a constitutive role, constructing new norms, including customary international law, within the international community. In short, accusations offer states and other stakeholders a menu of strategic options beyond those identified by the extant literature on naming and shaming.
Inclusive participation by all states is now taken for granted in many global governance efforts, but this was not always the normal practice. Nineteenth-century multilateralism, embedded in a world ...of "great powers," actively rejected broad participation, valuing small numbers, hierarchy, and status in coordinating action. Construction of broader participation norms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a joint project that owes much to innovations in the Americas and regional norms developed within that group as it organized meetings among the American states. Central to these norms was sovereign equality that, in the American context, entailed universal participation of all American states and voting on a one state—one vote basis at conferences. This article traces the spread of these norms from the Americas to the Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907, and highlights the varied sources for many of our contemporary multilateral practices in these early events.
Sociologists working in organization theory have developed a powerful set of arguments about the roles of norms and culture in international life that pose direct challenges to realist and liberal ...theories in political science. Their arguments locate causal force in an expanding and deepening Western world culture that emphasizes Weberian rationality as the means to both justice, defined as equality, and progress, defined as wealth accumulation. These world cultural rules constitute actors - including states, organizations, and individuals - and define legitimate or desirable goals for them to pursue. World cultural norms also produce organizational and behavioral similarities that are not easily explained by traditional paradigms in political science. Because they call these cultural norms and rules "institutions," the approach has been named "institutionalist" by those working within it. An overview is provided of sociology's institutionalism, and its implications for the study of world politics are explored.
Norms have never been absent from the study of international politics, but the sweeping “ideational turn” in the 1980s and 1990s brought them back as a central theoretical concern in the field. Much ...theorizing about norms has focused on how they create social structure, standards of appropriateness, and stability in international politics. Recent empirical research on norms, in contrast, has examined their role in creating political change, but change processes have been less well-theorized. We induce from this research a variety of theoretical arguments and testable hypotheses about the role of norms in political change. We argue that norms evolve in a three-stage “life cycle” of emergence, “norm cascades,” and internalization, and that each stage is governed by different motives, mechanisms, and behavioral logics. We also highlight the rational and strategic nature of many social construction processes and argue that theoretical progress will only be made by placing attention on the connections between norms and rationality rather than by opposing the two.
International Relations scholars have vigorous theories to explain why international organizations (IOs) are created, but they have paid little attention to IO behavior and whether IOs actually do ...what their creators intend. This blind spot flows logically from the economic theories of organization that have dominated the study of international institutions and regimes. To recover the agency and autonomy of IOs, we offer a constructivist approach. Building on Max Weber's well-known analysis of bureaucracy, we argue that IOs are much more powerful than even neoliberals have argued, and that the same characteristics of bureaucracy that make IOs powerful can also make them prone to dysfunctional behavior. IOs are powerful because, like all bureaucracies, they make rules, and, in so doing, they create social knowledge. IOs deploy this knowledge in ways that define shared international tasks, create new categories of actors, form new interests for actors, and transfer new models of political organization around the world. However, the same normative valuation on impersonal rules that defines bureaucracies and makes them powerful in modern life can also make them unresponsive to their environments, obsessed with their own rules at the expense of primary missions, and ultimately produce inefficient and self-defeating behavior. Sociological and constructivist approaches thus allow us to expand the research agenda beyond IO creation and to ask important questions about the consequences of global bureaucratization and the effects of IOs in world politics.
Despite preponderant power, unipoles often do not get their way. Why? Scholars interested in polarity and the systemic structures determined by the distribution of power have largely focused on ...material power alone, but the structure of world politics is as much social as it is material. In this article the author explores three social mechanisms that limit unipolar power and shape its possible uses. The first involves legitimation. To exercise power effectively, unipoles must legitimate it and in the act of legitimating their power, it must be diffused since legitimation lies in the hands of others. The second involves institutionalization. A common way to legitimate power is to institutionalize it. Institutionalizing power in rational-legal authorities fundamentally transforms it, however. Once in place, institutions, laws, and rules have powers and internal logics of their own that unipoles find difficult to control. The third relates to hypocrisy. The social structures of legitimation and insti tutionalization do more than simply diffuse power away from the unipole; they create incentives for hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is a double-edged sword for unipoles. On the one hand, unrestrained hypocrisy by unipoles undermines the legitimacy of their power. On the other hand, judicious hypocrisy can provide crucial strategies for melding ideals and interests. Indeed, honoring social ideals or principles in the breach can have long-lasting political effects, as decades of U.S. hypocrisy about democratization and human rights suggest.
In Show Time
, Lee Ann Fujii asks why some perpetrators of political
violence, from lynch mobs to genocidal killers, display their acts
of violence so publicly and extravagantly. Closely
examining ...three horrific and extreme episodes-the murder of a
prominent Tutsi family amidst the genocide in Rwanda, the execution
of Muslim men in a Serb-controlled village in Bosnia during the
Balkan Wars, and the lynching of a twenty-two-year old Black
farmhand on Maryland's Eastern Shore in 1933-Fujii shows how
"violent displays" are staged to not merely to kill those perceived
to be enemies or threats, but also to affect and influence
observers, neighbors, and the larger society.
Watching and participating in these violent displays profoundly
transforms those involved, reinforcing political identities, social
hierarchies, and power structures. Such public spectacles of
violence also force members of the community to choose sides-openly
show support for the goals of the violence, or risk becoming
victims, themselves. Tracing the ways in which public displays of
violence unfold, Show Time reveals how the perpetrators
exploit the fluidity of social ties for their own ends.
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