Do Wishes Matter? National Security and the Limits of Normative Entrepreneurship in Anti-Personnel Landmine Regime Formation
Do Wishes Matter? National Security and the Limits of Normative Entrepreneurship in Anti-Personnel Landmine Regime Formation

Summary/Abstract: Normative entrepreneurs, i.e., those political actors who attempt to promulgate a norm into wide acceptance, can influence the formation of international regimes once the norm they promote becomes widely accepted by most of the world’s countries. However, normative entrepreneurship has limits since not all states accept the proposed norms. This paper will try to answer the question of why that is the case. According to the article, some nations refuse to adopt standards that they believe could jeopardise their national security. Other states can accept the norm even with their national security interests affected due to humanitarian and diplomatic reasons. As a result, a regime could exist and be formed by normative entrepreneurs. However, some powers, potentially the major ones, might not accept it, limiting the regime’s efficacy. The article will present how this security-centric framework functions using the case of the anti-landmine norm and the Ottawa Convention. This approach can explain the membership limits that the regimes produced by normative entrepreneurs such as the Ottawa Convention face. Furthermore, the article will outline how this framework can be used to adjust the anti-personnel landmine norm to a less demanding form, i.e., in such a manner as not to compromise national security and make the spread of the regime-forming norm possible again.

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