ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the argument and detail the key concepts. It discusses the norms research background and aims to the practices of contestation and norm validation. The chapter explores the normative opportunity structure that shapes practices of norm contestation and validation. It explains the methodological framework that is applied to map practices and evaluates their effect based on a bifocal – empirical and normative – research perspective. The chapter deals with an outlook for further norms research within the wider framework of global international relations. Centring on the “agency of the governed” opens the field of norms research to normative questions about who, among the multiplicity of stakeholders, actually has access to engage with norms. Reactive contestation signals objection to a norm, a desire to supplant it or at least not apply it in a particular issue-domain. Differentiating three practices of norm validation helps identify access to processes of contestation, and, relatedly, the potential for developing ownership of, norms.
