ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by charting the common enterprise of decolonizing norms, and then considers what 'situated perspectives' in International Relations (IR) might look like. Norms have become part of IR's established tool-kit for analysing the behaviour of international actors that is driven, not merely by a concern for self-interest maximisation, but by a 'logic of appropriateness'. Norms are a key modality of the operation of discipline, which constitutes Foucault's historic contribution to understanding the ideational workings of power. 'Normation', 'normalization' and 'nomos' all offer important concepts for denaturalising norms. Situated perspectives, then, provide an epistemological via media that averts the pitfalls of both universalism and relativism. The postcolonial perspective, then, is necessarily a partial perspective that foregrounds grounded, embodied experiences, steeped in colonial histories, as the basis for engaging epistemologically. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book.
