Diffusion, contestation and localisation in

post-war states: 20 years of Western Balkans

reconstruction
Simone Tholensa and Lisa Großb
a
Robert Schuman Centre of Advanced Studies, European University Institute, Via dei Roccettini 9, 50014
San Domenico di Fiesole, Italy.
b
Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Konstanz, P.O. Box 86, D-78457
Konstanz, Germany.

This special issue explores norm diffusion, contestation and localisation in the contexts of
political transition in general and post-war peacebuilding specifically. It engages with
critical moments in which international diffusion endeavours meet local politics of norm
contestation in societies undergoing post-war and/or post-authoritarian transitions. The
‘third wave’ of norm research offers an agency-based approach to the negotiation and
contestation of the meaning of norms that is consistent with work in peacebuilding studies
on the meeting between international norms and local realities in post-war contexts.
By honing in on the ‘normative powers’ of local agents, their perspectives and capacities,
and how these contribute to norm construction, the special issue provides theoretical and
conceptual advances to capture these transition processes in the context of the Western
Balkans.
Journal of International Relations and Development (2015) 18, 249–264.
doi:10.1057/jird.2015.21

Keywords: norm diffusion; localization; contestation; peacebuilding; Western Balkans

Introduction
The recent wave on norm contestation and localisation has moved beyond a
perspective of external socialisation. Instead, it focuses on the spread of norms from
the vantage point of the local/domestic, emphasising the interactive and inter-
relational nature of norms, and rendering contestation patterns, localisation practices,
and translation strategies the subject of analysis (Acharya 2004, 2009; Wiener 2004,
2007, 2014). As such, it connects with work in the subdiscipline of critical
peacebuilding, where ‘friction’ and ‘hybridity’ have emerged as central concepts to
describe the interactions between international and local actors and normative
frameworks in post-war contexts (Mac Ginty 2010; Jarstad and Belloni 2012;
Björkdahl and Höglund 2013; Millar et al. 2013). These international–local
encounters and interactions in post-war contexts provide the point of departure of
Journal of International Relations and Development, 2015, 18, (249–264) www.palgrave-journals.com/jird/
© 2015 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1408-6980/15
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this special issue; however, the issue aims to provide analyses that utilise advanced
diffusion frameworks more actively. We are interested primarily in norm diffusion as
an ‘interactive process’, and we focus on the repertoire of action available to
domestic actors in the process of giving meaning to, contesting and localising
externally derived norms. This focus on normative powers of local actors to shape
and reconstitute international norms is often neglected, implicit or sidelined in
peacebuilding literature. More specific analyses of the intense dynamics at the
interface between international norms and local agents in post-war environments may
give way to better understanding of both the theory of diffusion processes and the
(unintended) effects of ‘social engineering’ in transition contexts. In other words, we
believe that cross-fertilisation can produce new and deeper comprehension of both
theory and practice in this rich empirical field of enquiry.
Because of its unprecedented exposure to international norm diffusion efforts in
recent years, the Western Balkans peace- and statebuilding experiences provide
appropriate empirical terrain for such an undertaking. Much has been written about the
Western Balkans as a test for the liberal peacebuilding enterprise (Ignatieff 2003;
Gheciu 2005; Chandler 2006; Aggestam and Björkdahl 2014; Kappler 2014), and as a
laboratory for the limits and potentialities of Europeanisation (Noutcheva 2009;
Freyburg and Richter 2010; Bieber 2011a; Elbasani 2013). Undoubtedly, powerful
international actors have been heavily involved in the statebuilding process in the region
and have contributed to preventing the recurrence of violence through its firm presence
on the ground. At the same time, however, the long-term commitment to socialising the
region’s states into the economic and security fold of Europe has also generated an
exceptional effort — and some distorted consequences — at transferring norms, ideas,
institutions and practices from international actors into domestic societies.
In the introduction to this special issue, we first tackle two hitherto parallel
research endeavours that both address the conflictual interface between the interna-
tional and the local, namely, norm research and critical peacebuilding. We observe a
lack of cross-fertilisation between the two research enterprises, and we clarify how
this special issue contributes to making up for this lack. Subsequently, we
circumscribe the nexus whereby norm diffusion studies and peacebuilding/state-
building studies may be mutually enriched, before outlining, finally, how the
contributors in different ways manoeuvre the conceptual space, and how they
contribute to the aggregated findings of the special issue.

Norm diffusion and contestation

Research on the way norms are diffused throughout the international system emerged
with the rise of social constructivism in International Relations (IR) in the 1990s and
has since evolved in what can be described as three waves.1 The first wave of norm
diffusion literature points to the role of norm entrepreneurs and transnational
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advocacy networks in the process from ‘norm emergence’ to ‘norm internalisation’ in

domestic and transnational settings. The different norm diffusion models (Finnemore
and Sikkink 1998; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Risse et al. 1999) explore the stages and
causal mechanisms of how international norms impact upon state behaviour in the
domestic realm. The first wave contributions provide a welcome addition to the
dominantly state-centric perspective in IR in that they point to the relevance of
domestic civil society and transnational advocacy networks as norm entrepreneurs.
Turning to these local and transnational actors in the attempt to understand post-war
norm diffusion in the Western Balkans might yield fruitful insights beyond state
elites and international peacebuilding organisations. Still, the first wave of norm
diffusion studies does not pay sufficient attention to the many cases of ‘unsuccessful
internalisation’ of international norms in the target state.
The question of ‘internalisation’ or ‘socialisation’ is taken up by the second wave
of norm research, which in the 2000s was dominated by a particular interest in the scope
of the EU’s transformative power in candidate countries and conditions for successful
EU accession. International norm diffusion is discussed here according to the domestic
organisational, political and cultural scope conditions for successful norm transfer
(Cortell and Davis 2000, 2005; Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier 2005; Schimmelfennig
et al. 2006), and evaluated in terms of full, partial or no compliance (Noutcheva 2009).
This is also reflected in the EU External Governance literature, where diffusion is viewed
as successful transposition of EU law and norms in national frameworks beyond the
realm of membership (Lavenex 2004; Lavenex and Schimmelfennig 2009). The second
wave engages more in detail with the different international instruments used for norm
promotion, such as persuasion, financial assistance, conditionality and coercion (Börzel
and Risse 2012). This distinction provides a potential starting point for more systematic
accounts of processes of contestation and localisation in post-war contexts. However, the
‘domestic side’ of norm diffusion is often reduced to domestic conditions that might
mitigate external norm promotion activities — either as adoption costs (Schimmelfennig
2005), in the form of domestic filters (Manners 2002), or as a rather fixed cultural match
(Checkel 1999, 2001). In the Western Balkans, where EU conditionality seems less
successful compared to the candidate countries in Eastern Europe (Bieber 2011b), a
polarised political arena, weak state structures or widespread clientelism and corruption
(Schimmelfennig 2008; Noutcheva 2009; Freyburg and Richter 2010) are discussed as
domestic conditions that limit the ‘transformative power of Europe’ in the region.
However, norm diffusion models remain static and the concern for how ‘conditionality’
impacts the processes remains the dominant analytical framework of the EU–Western
Balkans interaction (Bieber 2011a; Džihić and Wieser 2011). Research often fails to
engage in depth with negotiations between norm promoters and local actors and the
transformation of international norms into international–local hybrids once they are
subjected to the domestic arena.
A more dynamic, less wholesale and critical approach to the way norms travel is
chosen in the emerging third wave of norm research, which investigates the processes
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of contestation and localisation inherent in the spread of normative precepts. The

third wave offers an opportunity to engage more in depth with the domestic side of
norm diffusion in post-war states; the interactive and inter-relational nature of norms;
and the processes and mechanisms at work inside Western Balkan countries.
Contestation describes a process of constituting meaning through interactions.
It assumes that norms are constantly negotiated and acquire divergent meanings
depending on the context in which they are used (Wiener 2004). Contestation asks us
to pay more attention to the subtle differences in discourses over the meaning of
norms and the different ‘associative connotations’ a norm can entail in various
contexts. Similarly, localisation describes norm diffusion as the processes of
congruence building between transnational norms and local beliefs and practices
(Acharya 2004: 241). Congruence is here established by domestic actors in an active
process of framing and grafting, in which an international norm gets introduced into a
new context. Moreover, with framing, Acharya holds, norm advocates may actively
establish linkages between the existing and international norms. International norm
diffusion can be met with resistance, localisation or acceptance, while localisation
describes the creation of new tasks and instruments that alter significantly the
existing institutional structure, but not the normative belief system: ‘Localization, not
wholesale acceptance or rejection, settles most cases of normative contestation’,
argues Acharya (2004: 239). This has been demonstrated in cases as diverse as the
spread of small arms norms in South East Asia (Capie 2008), international women’s
rights norms (Zwingel 2012), and civil and political rights in Guatemala
(Zimmermann 2014).
The third wave of norm research is thus a useful framework to capture the attempts
aimed at changing normative structures in transition societies, and allows treating
these as politically motivated and highly normatively charged strategies rather than
technical undertakings between war and peace. The approach is concerned with the
variegated mechanisms of agency involved in the processes of norm negotiation, and
in the hybrid results that often follow from massive international norm promotion
efforts — both of which are recurrent themes in peacebuilding literature. It is thus
puzzling that so few studies have applied this literature systematically to transition
contexts and peacebuilding environments where international actors are particularly
involved (for exceptions, see Alldén 2009; Tholens 2012; Groß 2014; Zimmermann
2014). In the next section, we discuss equivalent frameworks of analysis in the rich
field of critical peacebuilding literature.

Critical peacebuilding
Research in the field of post-war peacebuilding is also concerned with the attempt by
international actors to socialise and engineer target states and domestic societies
(Gheciu 2005; Björkdahl 2006). Many see this generally as a desired approach to
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promote democracy and development (Doyle and Sambanis 2006), some argue for
alterations to the framework due to its resemblance to ‘Empire Lite’ (Ignatieff 2003)
or the mission civilisatrice (Paris 2002), while others criticise the incoherent
principles upon which such liberal peacebuilding rests (Richmond 2005, 2008).
It has been noted that the neoliberal peacebuilding enterprise deeply resembles the
imperial practices of socialising and co-opting elites (Chandler 2006; Darby 2009),
and that the use of local ownership models and capacity building techniques are
essentially attempts at teaching a selected segment of the population the correct
‘formula’ of liberal democratic systems (Gheciu 2005; Narten 2009). From a post-
colonial point of view, authors analyse ‘local resistance’ to international peace-
building attempts (Richmond and Franks 2007; Darby 2009; Richmond 2010) using
frameworks that question the basic viability of peacebuilding projects, and the power
relations in which they operate.
Two interrelated strands of peacebuilding literature have recently sought to
address the interplay of the international and the local in contexts of contemporary
peacebuilding, with a view to discern the agency of domestic actors, and to reduce
the all-powerful idea of international actors often implied in critical peacebuilding
literature. The first strand is centred on the concepts of ‘hybridity’ and ‘hybrid peace’.
According to Mac Ginty (2010), these concepts capture the interaction among a
myriad of international and domestic actors in neoliberal peacebuilding, and
especially the capacity for resistance and subversion on the part of local actors who
were previously considered ‘victimised’. ‘Hybridity’ breaks down clear-cut distinc-
tions between the international and the local, and depicts a complex multidimen-
sional environment in which ‘local and international actors grapple with the
limitations to their power and legitimacy’ (Mac Ginty 2010: 405). Laffey and
Nadarajah (2012) follow up on this by questioning the inherently hybrid enterprise of
liberal peace and peacebuilding itself. Moreover, in an edited issue, focusing on the
importance of local agency in shaping peacebuilding outcomes, Jarstad and Belloni
(2012) take a more empirical understanding of hybridity as ‘a condition where liberal
and illiberal norms, institutions and actors coexist, interact and even clash’ (1). They
distinguish between liberal and ‘illiberal’ norms, and outline the ideal types of
governance models that combine elements from the two categories. The analyses
capture very well the ‘politics of diffusion’ as it takes place in post-war contexts;
however, to a large extent, they remain at the level of problematising how ‘hybridity
suggests the potential to more firmly ground peace processes in the domestic reality
of conflict areas’ (ibid.: 4). Contributions in their edited issue address the significance
of local ownership and emphasise the importance of local agency for the outcome of
norm transmission in democracy promotion (Zahar 2012), reflecting a general
tendency towards more agency-based analyses of post-war reconstruction (see
Schroeder and Chappuis 2014; Schröder et al. 2014). Yet, the editors conclude with
an oft-heard statement of the need to ‘develop greater context sensitivity and to move
away from the idea of a single model of the state rooted in the Westphalian tradition’
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(Jarstad and Belloni 2012: 4), indicating that more conceptual gains may be found by
developing the framework further.
The second and related strand of critical peacebuilding research aims at a more
fine-grained understanding of hybridity at the interface between the international and
the local, and has been concerned with ‘friction’ (Björkdahl and Höglund 2013;
Millar et al. 2013). Friction is intended to be better able to capture the conflictual
encounters between global and local ideas, actors and practices in peacebuilding,
resulting in six possible outcomes: compliance, adoption, adaptation, co-option,
resistance or rejection (Björkdahl and Höglund 2013: 297). Such an operationalisa-
tion of the meeting between the global and the local is helpful in bringing to the fore
the many instances of power and contestation that are taking place in peacebuilding
situations, and it certainly helps de-romanticising ‘the local’. Others, focusing on
differences in how perceptions influence the different local and international peace-
building strategies and the outcomes of their interaction, have also sought to frame
friction as a form of ‘localisation’ (Hellmüller 2013).
However, while both strands of work on hybridity and friction aim to capture those
crucial elusive and multifaceted meetings between the global and the local, they
rarely engage in the quest for more generalisable findings on the conditions,
mechanisms, logics or patterns that characterise the diffusion and contestation of
norms in IR. Moreover, there is a subdisciplinary loyalty underpinning these
frameworks that precludes moving the field towards broader discussions in IR. The
rich debates on diffusion, contestation and localisation that have developed over two
decades are, to a large extent, ignored in this bulk of literature. This is a missed
opportunity, not only to make peacebuilding an empirical field of enquiry in broader
IR debates, diminishing their status as sui generis cases, but also to develop more
systematic analyses of how norms travel in this dense context of norm contestation.
In the next section, we outline why analysing post-war peace- and statebuilding
societies along a ‘third wave’ of norm research is fruitful.

Diffusion, contestation and localisation: an alternative approach to post-

war transitions
Thus far, applying norm diffusion frameworks to post-war reconstruction processes
has not gained major traction, despite its rather obvious ground for cross-fertilisation.
Therefore, in order to apply norm diffusion and contestation frameworks to post-war
transition contexts, certain contextual particularities specific to societies emerging
from violent conflict ought to be clarified.
First of all, many post-war and transition states, and certainly the states in the
Western Balkans, are under significant pressure to reform by very powerful interna-
tional actors. The situation may be described partly as one of ‘limited statehood’ in
some states. This implies that the voluntary nature of the norm process is disputed, and
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that norms spread through a wide array of mechanisms, ranging from persuasion to
coercion. Peacebuilding contexts, therefore, differ somewhat from ‘regular’ norm
diffusion taking place under conditions of voluntary selection, inasmuch as peace-
building tends to take on a more intrusive and ‘direct’ character and, consequently,
often appears more like policy transfer. This, however, does not prevent the framework
from being applicable; on the contrary, it is probably in these situations that
international actors should be expected to have most ‘tools in the box’ to push norm
adoption by the target state, and thus it is here that the diffusion/transfer dynamics are
most pertinent. Moreover, the third wave of norm research is concerned primarily with
the role of local agents in re-enacting the meaning of internationally derived norms,
which is a crucial aspect of the politics taking place in contexts of ‘limited statehood’.
Second, post-war situations often differ from the usual norm diffusion contexts
with respect to the social — and material — structures in place. Wars are shocks that
trigger major social reconfiguration, and structures are likely to be in flux. While we
perceive norm diffusion and contestation analyses to be equally applicable to post-
war societies, domestic conditions here are probably of a much less stable nature than
what is usually assumed in the norm diffusion literature. This is captured in the
literature on statebuilding, which also recognises the strategic negotiations taking
place between the international and the local (Barnett and Zürcher 2008). Again,
however, this does not preclude a treatment of post-war societies as spaces of norm
diffusion and negotiation; it is, in fact, precisely in such situations that new norms
may spread more easily, as the normative space is under renegotiation, and as new
social groups scramble to gain a stake in the post-war order.
Subsequently, we propose an approach to post-war reconstruction that takes into
account the entire trajectory of norms, ideas, institutions and practices as they originate
from the headquarters of international organisations, enter into contested transition
spaces via often more pragmatically inclined practitioners, and undergo translation,
localisation and adaptation as they are transmitted and negotiated among domestic
actors. While diffusion frameworks of the first and the second waves are often
concerned with the outcome of such norm trajectories, we are interested primarily in
treating them as interactive processes, thereby being less concerned with specifying the
exact situation after an internationally driven norm transfer/diffusion effort and instead
focusing primarily on the repertoire of action available to variegated domestic actors in
the process of giving meaning to and localising externally derived norms. This focus
on norm contestations as interactive processes is often neglected in much post-war
peacebuilding literature, and deserves a more prominent place in the quest for insight
into the dynamics at the interface between international norms and local agents.
We thus provide an optic that is centred specifically on three concepts of central
concern to norm literature, but largely not contextualised in the framework of post-
war reconstruction processes.
Diffusion in the context of post-war reconstruction countries means the transmis-
sion of a specific set of rules, norms, ideas and practices by international actors to a
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target state, in which external actors operate in a territory that may qualify as
possessing ‘low statehood’ due to the fragmentation of institutions designed to
control functionally the territory of the state. Diffusion here covers processes ranging
from the direct transfer or ‘export’ of specific norms to the more loosely organised
spread of broad normative frameworks derived from external sources and actors.
Often, the two are combined, such as when a general model of liberal peace is
promoted in parallel with the specific norms of, for example, minority rights or
privatisation of security. At other times, the two types of diffusion might be working
against each other, for example, when the general norms of sovereignty and
statebuilding run counter to the norm promoter’s own practices in multilateral
forums, thereby weakening the credibility of both the general norm and the norm
promoter itself (Marciacq in this issue). However, what is evident from both the
direct transfer type of diffusion and the loosely organised norm derivation process is
that the negotiations and translations taking place at the domestic/local level are
fundamental to the meaning of norms, the plausibility of their implementation and
their sustainability.
Contestation in post-war reconstruction contexts refers to the processes of
constituting the meaning of international norms through constant interaction and
mobilisation in local political struggles. It acknowledges the interactive and inter-
relational nature of norms and emphasises the fact that international norms are
abstract entities that have to be filled with meaning if they are to generate and
maintain legitimacy within a broader social context, and be adopted and implemented
(Wiener 2007: 6). Contestation is thus a norm-generating practice and fundamental in
the process of co-constituting the meaning of international norms among actors
(Wiener 2014). Local actors play diverse roles in such norm contestation processes,
as they participate in the co-construction of the local meaning of an international
norm through mechanisms such as discourses, framing and grafting. Different sets of
local agents might engage in the contestation of international norms according to
different degrees of open confrontation with such norms, and according to their
interest and capacity in co-opting normative frameworks according to their own
agenda (Björkdahl and Gusic in this issue). It is a continuous and interactive process
that acknowledges changes in normative meaning over time. Yet, contestation over
the meaning of international norms might bring to the fore substantially different
interpretations that are not easily reconciled. Especially in post-war contexts, where
norm contestation is often shaped by experiences of conflict and polarisation,
diverging interpretations of the meaning of an international norm is a likely result of
norm diffusion (Groß in this issue). The meaning of norms can be contested between
international actors and domestic elites, as in the case of the norm of transitional
justice in the Western Balkans, where international actors have linked transitional
justice to universal values of truth and justice, while domestic elites interpret it as a
tool to confirm particularistic truths and justice for their own ethnic groups (Subotic
in this issue). As such, international norms are subjected to the processes of
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contestation, in which, sometimes, conflictive interpretations of a norm are pitted

against one another.
Localisation as applied to post-war reconstruction originates from Acharya’s
(2004, 2009) structured framework of congruence-finding or ‘dynamic matchmak-
ing’ between an external idea and the local ‘cognitive prior’. While Acharya treats
localisation explicitly as an outcome of norm diffusion processes, arguing that it is
the most likely outcome, it features many of the same dynamics of contestation as we
understand it above. Different readings of the concept exist, and we are primarily
concerned with adding two adaptations to Acharya’s framework in order to apply it
to post-war reconstruction contexts. First, localisation involves not only elites, but
also negotiations between elites and other groups in society. In Asian regionalism,
where the framework originates, the stable and state-centric structures in place do not
require as much attention to the negotiations over the meaning of norms between the
state and society as it is clearly required in the case of post-war and transition states.
Second, localisation concerns not only the existing ‘cognitive priors’, but, equally
significantly, the emerging normative frameworks or ‘master narratives’ that
scramble for dominance and legitimacy in the post-war phase of establishing a new
social order (Tholens 2012). We thus define localisation in post-war and transition
contexts as a strategic matchmaking process, whereby external norms go through a
series of adaptation and translation processes in order to find congruence with the
emerging normative frameworks. This process may be determined by the elites’
capacity to frame the norm according to the existing norm hierarchies (Gheciu in this
issue) and by the fierce struggle concerning the dominant narratives in the context of
monopolising the post-war normative space. As such, negotiations between elites and
their constituent society are fundamental to norm diffusion processes. It is at this
level of negotiating international norms between different local narratives and
between diverse sets of local actors that constitutive norm dynamics appear to rest.
This reflects findings from norm research more generally, which finds that ‘powerful
normative precepts spread to the rest of the globe not through simple processes of
socialisation, but also through mobilisation in concrete political struggles’
(Reus‐Smit 2011: 1215).
Having outlined the special issue’s overall approach to the study of post-war
transition processes in the Western Balkans, we now give a brief account of the
findings from the contributing authors.

Contributors
The contributors to this special issue have all sought to move beyond their
disciplinary boundaries and approach the empirical issue area of post-war reconstruc-
tion in the Western Balkans through the lens of diffusion, contestation and
localisation. This has led to a collective effort that combines work that would be
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traditionally described as Europeanisation with work that is usually located under the
umbrella of critical peacebuilding, and with analyses of the power of norms in IR.
Bringing together these various contributions within the framework of diffusion,
contestation and localisation has given way to a publication where these three central
concepts are given further consideration in the challenging context of post-war
reconstruction and transition.
Annika Björkdahl and Ivan Gusic critically approach the concept of local agency
in peacebuilding contexts, and provide a useful register of ‘local agents’ based on
their frictional encounters with norms embedded in the liberal democratic peace:
localising agents, co-opting agents and counter-acting agents. Each category of
actors engages with, but responds differently to, the promotion of international
norms, but what is common to all is that the response to external norms is mired
in the politics on the ground in post-war societies, and that one cannot put politics
‘on hold’ while norm diffusion takes place. Actively approaching the synergy
between norm diffusion literature’s focus on structure and the peacebuilding
literature’s concern with ‘friction’ in the meeting between global norms and local
actors, the authors examine how the three categories of local agents dealt with
liberal democratic norms in the Kosovo peacebuilding experience. They identify
how specific local actors, such as an NGO in Mitrovica, acted as localising
agents; how Albanian elites instrumentalised liberal peace norms for political
goals, resulting in the co-optation of such norms; and finally, how counter-acting
agents such as the Vetëvendosje! movement openly resisted the introduction of
liberal democratic norms in Kosovo.
Alexandra Gheciu brings Bourdieu’s theory of field, habitus and capital into the
debate about norm localisation with the goal to provide an analytical framework
through which she explores the sources of power available to local actors and the
underlying logics that shape norm localisation strategies in their respective fields.
Gheciu shows how the liberal project of security privatisation has been shaped by the
habitus and capital inherited from the violent past, rather than by liberal principles in
Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia. She shows that security providers, with complex
connections to individuals and resources associated with the state, were able to
achieve more powerful positions in the field of security, thereby limiting the
international actors’ efforts to promote liberal democratic principles of accountabil-
ity, transparency and respect for human rights by the persistence of war-time habitus
and capital in the field of security.
Lisa Groß engages with the ‘local meaning’ that international norms acquire in
post-war Kosovo, and how norm contestation and localisation are shaped by
war-time experiences, social polarisation and the saliency of conflict goals.
Taking the norms of democracy and minority rights as examples, Groß shows
how social polarisation between the former conflict parties and the segregated
discursive areas leads to divergent local normative meanings. She argues
that norm contestation has to be understood as a strategic emphasis on the
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259

elements of an international norm with the aim to build congruence with the
conflict goal. Both Kosovo Albanians and Kosovo Serbs perceive the norm of
democracy as a tool to build congruence with their respective goals (indepen-
dence for Albanians, remaining in Serbia for Serbs), while the norm of minority
rights does not allow such congruence-building in the respective constituencies.
Through a comparative study, Groß shows how this influences norm implementa-
tion in practice.
Norm diffusion in the Western Balkans is a crowded field, and norms by one actor
may be contested by those of others. Florent Marciacq explores the inter-organisa-
tional dynamics between the EU and other international organisations in international
norm diffusion processes in Western Balkan states, and focuses on the trajectory of
international norms between IOs and the domestic level. Marciacq shows that the
relations that the EU maintains with the respective international organisations, be it
supplementary, complementary or ambiguous, influence the local contestations over
international norms and norm diffusion outcomes. He argues that the meaning of
international norms is constituted by the inter-organisational context in which norms
are diffused, and he demonstrates this argument empirically with case studies of the
interaction between the EU norms and the ICTY norms in the area of international
justice, the NATO norms in the area of security and defence, and the OSCE norms in
the area of multilateral diplomacy.
Finally, Jelena Subotic investigates how norms pertaining to the dense and
contradictory field of transnational justice have travelled into Western Balkans
societies and taken on new, contradictory and constitutive meanings. She thus goes
beyond addressing the question of whether or not states adopt the norms and
mechanisms embodied in international justice; rather, she engages with how
domestic actors actually do this and to what political effect. By unpacking the
different meanings given to the concepts of ‘truth’, ‘justice’ and ‘reconciliation’
among the constituents in Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo and Serbia, she focuses on a form
of localisation defined as ‘norm divergence’, whereby an international norm splits
into a variety of locally meaningful, but mutually contradictory directions. She shows
how domestic political actors interpret the same international norms in mutually
inconsistent, but politically useful ways, by adding their own, often contradictory
elements to the norm before its implementation, and then operationalise the norm
differently yet again, once it is adopted by domestic institutions.
The contributors to this special issue have approached the issue of how external
norms travel into post-war and transition societies from different perspectives, each
providing original empirical evidence from the Western Balkans. Illustrative of the
complex and contested realm of transition politics in this diverse region, their
findings emphasise different elements of the norm trajectories between international
norms and domestic societies. In the conclusion, we sum up how the overall
approach of norm diffusion, contestation and localisation has an added value in
analyses of post-war reconstruction.
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Conclusion
The optic of diffusion, contestation and localisation proposed by this special issue
has at least two distinct advantages.
First, it captures the trajectory of norms, and the multiple steps along the way
where norms are negotiated, translated, resisted and localised. This special issue
shows that it is pertinent to observe the many processes of adaptation, localisation
and ‘hybrid’ systems of governance that emerge when international norms enter into
post-war societies. Instead of remaining at the level of assessing the extent to which
such domestic factors serve as ‘obstacles’ or ‘scope conditions’ for norm diffusion,
however, the contributors have gained even more from studying these trajectories in
their own right and as part of broader processes in international and domestic politics.
This has served as a clear and decisive break with the EU norm bias in Europeanisa-
tion research, and with the dichotomy between international norm promoters and
‘local spoilers’ in peacebuilding research.
Second, the special issue demonstrates that the empirical track record of norm
diffusion in post-war reconstruction contexts rests firmly with a locally driven
contestation process, whereby mobilisation in local political struggles is key to the
spread of international norms. Empirically, we observe how external ideas, norms,
rules or practices fail to gain ground unless they mobilise local debates over their
meaning and role in the domestic norm hierarchy, and undergo processes of
localisation. It also shows the limited ability of international actors to influence
these domestic debates over the meaning of norms, leading to the conclusion that
focusing on norm contestation in peacebuilding contexts from a ‘third wave’
perspective is crucial in order to capture the variegated mechanisms of local agency
in these processes.
The contributions of this special issue uncover several levels where domestic
agents endow international norms with meaning in the local context. At a contextual
level, habitus and pre-war resources have been demonstrated to influence the way
international norms are localised (Gheciu), and the inter-organisational context needs
to be disentangled if diverse norm diffusion outcomes are to be understood
(Marciacq). Moreover, at an agential level, it has been shown that the strategies of
local agents — co-option, localisation, counter-action — are key to understanding
the transfer of international norms, and also that these strategies are used for domestic
political purposes (Björkdahl and Gusic). Finally, at a discursive level, the interaction
between structure and agency becomes particularly clear, so that both local grassroots
discourses (Groß) and the elites’ framing strategies (Subotic) are used to enhance
particularistic political goals.
The optic of local contestation in post-war reconstruction and transition contexts
has thus permitted breaking down dichotomies between local and global norms,
differentiating between the variety of domestic and local agency, and elaborating on
the nuances between norm diffusion as a process and as an outcome. While these are
 Simone Tholens and Lisa Groß
Diffusion, contestation and localisation in post-war states
261

just some of the findings of this special issue, we clearly see these as advantages that
should be explored further in future research, and which will enable both research
enterprises to reach mutual enrichment in the ambition to overcome subdisciplinary
compartmentalisation.

Note
1 We leave the discussion on the nature of norms to the contributors of this special issue, but we take note
that different understandings are of essence, ranging from bounded rationality, where norms are seen as
causes that create an effect, that is, norms as ‘collective expectations for the proper behaviour of actors
with a given identity’ (Katzenstein 1996: 6; see also Finnemore and Sikkink 1998), to post-structuralist
accounts, where norms are fundamentally constructing interest and are thus ‘symbolic technologies’,
which are ‘themselves forms of power through their capacities to produce representations’ (Laffey and
Weldes 1997: 210), thereby treating norms as processes rather than a ‘cause’, emphasising how ‘norms
are subject to ongoing attempts to reconstitute their meanings’ (Krook and True 2012: 109).

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About the authors

Simone Tholens is a Research Associate at the ‘Borderlands’ project, hosted at the
RSCAS, European University Institute, and Adjunct Professor of Conflict Manage-
ment at Johns Hopkins University, SAIS Europe. Her research deals with the
diffusion of rules, norms and practices in contexts of peacebuilding in the Western
Balkans and South East Asia, and in the EU-Southern Mediterranean relationship.
The current Special Issue was conceived following the completion of her Ph.D.,
entitled ‘International Norms and Local Agency: Micro-Disarmament in Cambodia
and Kosovo’ (Tholens, 2012).

Lisa Groß received her Ph.D. from the Department of Politics and Public
Administration, University of Konstanz. Her research interests include post-conflict
peacebuilding, international norm diffusion and post-war democratization. The
Ph.D. entitled ‘Capturing Post-War Transitions’ investigates external-domestic
interactions in peacebuilding in Kosovo. She worked as research associate in the
project ‘The European Union as a Democracy Promoter in the Western Balkans’
at the University of Konstanz. Publications in peer-reviewed journals include
‘The External-Domestic Interplay in Post-Conflict Democracy Promotion’ in
Democratization, 2013 with Sonja Grimm.