This cumulative dissertation explores the contestation of global norms. It seeks to shed light on the discursive strategies behind those struggles about meaning and asks about their relation to normative change on the international level. To do so, I accept the empirical ambiguity and contestedness of normative meaning as a starting point, not an analytical problem to be overcome. Rather than isolating ‘pure’ and unambiguous norms that can be neatly traced, the articles in this dissertation seek to shed light on those ambiguities, contradictions and tensions: First, how can be conceptualize them and capture them analytically? Second, what do actors do with those ambiguities and contradictions? How do they leverage them? How are they bound by normative struc-tures and, simultaneously, how do they engage and seek to transform them? How do actors use norms and normative context in struggles over meaning, for example by exploiting, resisting, subverting, stabilizing or de-stabilizing them? What agency lies in gaining power over definition and meaning? And third, what does this teach us about the process of normative change on the international level? This dissertation consists of four separate articles. First, Political Steering: How the EU Employs Power in its Neighbourhood Policy towards Morocco, was published in Mediterranean Politics and co-authored with David Remmert. It explores the European Union’s promotion of the rule of law and human rights norms and conceptualizes this as a form of discursive power. Second, Appropriation and the Dualism of Human Rights: Understanding the Contradictory Impact of Gender Norms in Nigeria was published in Third World Quar-terly. It conceptualizes appropriation as a form of local agency in norm promotion pro-cesses. Third, Friction, not Erosion: Assassination Norms at the Fault Line between Sovereignty and Liberal Values was published in Contemporary Security Policy. It shifts the focus towards the conundrum of weakening norms and explores the role of normative context in it, stressing normative change as slow and incremental. Fourth, Talking ‘Heads’: The Language of Decapitation and the Targeting of Individuals in U.S. Security Policy is an unpublished manuscript. It addresses the domestic side of targeted killing norms and highlights the gradual nature of normative change in U.S. security discourses and targeting paradigms
