- Constructing Global Order: Agency and Change in World Politics by Amitav Acharya
In this clear and compelling book, Acharya examines who makes and manages international order. Like many constructivists, he is interested in the part that norms play in answering these questions. Specifically, how are global norms created, promulgated, resisted, and modified through contestation among interested parties? The book differs from many other accounts of norms by focusing on the role of the global South in this process of contestation. Acharya argues that these developing states and the non-state actors within them have significant agency in shaping global norms. He contends that weaker states can resist and alter norms through appeals to localization and subsidiarity. This simple resistance to norms, however, is the least interesting part of the story. Acharya demonstrates how poor and relatively less powerful states are able to propagate new norms as sources of leverage in disputes with great powers and the global North more broadly, again, by appealing to local conditions. Such changes enacted to fit particular conditions can forever alter a global norm. Acharya also finds that norm creation and implementation is often regional in nature, though regional normative regimes usually support rather than undermine global normative regimes. [End Page 653]
Acharya supports his argument in a series of case studies about sovereignty and security: newly independent states in the post–World War II era shaping norms of sovereignty and non-interference; Latin American states incorporating regional institutions, such as the Organization of American States, into the new international-security architecture of the United Nations; the creation of the responsibility to protect norms; and attempts to move away from national-security conceptions based on external threats to the state in favor of human-security conceptions regarding internal threats to individuals. The cases are remarkably detailed given their sweeping nature and the relative brevity of the work. They show that states from the South often successfully shaped norms to fit their preferences or at least achieved serious concessions from states in the North.
This is not to suggest that the cases focus solely on North–South normative conflicts. The South is hardly united when it comes to normative preferences due to varying local conditions, experiences, and threats. Acharya nicely illustrates intra-South contestation, especially between African and Asian states concerning human security and the responsibility to protect. He also shows that norm entrepreneurs in the North and South have at times worked together, such as when they broadened the notion of security to include economic and environmental threats. Although Acharya could have expanded his discussion of Latin America's distinctive position within the South, given its Western heritage and longer post-colonial experience relative to Africa and Asia, the book is an important contribution to our understanding of how norms are formed and how they shape the global order.