I’ve been in a Political Science and Philosophy graduate reading group this semester and it has been a very interesting experience. First off, we use the same words to say different things. Secondly, there is a drastic difference in writing style from one discipline to the other. Thirdly, we have differing ideas of an agent’s (loosely speaking, people and institutions made up of people) relative importance as it corresponds to an overarching structure.
A talk today was given by Kathyrn Sikkink over her book The Justice Cascade. The premise is that a new model is needed to understand political change, and specifically in this case, the drive to punish individual heads of state for human rights violations.
This stance is novel for a couple reasons. One, heads of state are usually immune after their regime or they leave power for the crimes they committed. Two, state sovereignty is not usually violated. International courts can prosecute current heads of state for violations (with varying degrees of success of course). So what accounts for this paradigm shift.
In short, norms about harm, revenge, human rights, and notions of sovereignty come into play. The Justice Cascade is the diffusion of these norms more globally. These ideas are ignored by traditional constructivist political scienctists because ideas and agents are too small and unimportant compared to the structures they inhabit.
Not so anymore. Media, new and old, is more and more global. There is a reason China keeps a lock on social networking sites. Ideas can be disseminated quickly with minimal effort. What someone wrote about justice in France can be read by someone in Libya. When dissidents in Syria are struggling to find the words or the frame work for their cause, they can read and discuss the uprisings in Tunisia.
Technology is an interesting new factor, becoming a channel for the old norms we in the west have lived by and transmitting them elsewhere. This would be a more interesting line of thought to follow.
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