Norm diffusion as a practice of abjection the UN women agenda and the abjection of harmful traditional practices

Abstract

This paper brings the Kristevan perspective on hierarchy into a conversation with norm research and accordingly borrows the concept of the abject, formulated to study the formation of the Self and Other and the following hierarchy between the two, to better understand the hierarchical implications of norm diffusion. The research, therefore, redefines norm diffusion as a practice of norm abjection due to the diffusion’s hegemonic, subordinating, and transformative character, and doing so has enabled us to illustrate the implications for the norm research of the dual-performative function of the normative hierarchy: (i) formation of the boundary between the Self and the Other and (ii) maintaining it through active exclusion and normative expansion. The paper empirically studies the functioning of norm abjection in the example of the United Nations’ (UN) harmful traditional practices (HTP) agenda, a fiercely condemnatory and decisively transformative normative project of the UN informed by its liberative development discourses and emancipatory gender regime. The paper, accordingly, examines the UN’s abjecting of the harmful traditional practices as part of its efforts for diffusing progressive and emancipatory gender norms to the localities in the underdeveloped world to cast out the local vicious, wicked, primitive, and not-so-normative practices and rather implant the true, moral, superior, and universal norms. Our findings contribute to the unveiling of the dual-performative hierarchy the norm diffusion generates and of the colonial subject position the UN maintains.