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Introduction: How Contestation Provides Insight into Normative Behavior

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Norm Contestation

Part of the book series: SpringerBriefs in Political Science ((BRIEFSPOLITICAL))

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Abstract

“'It bothers me when [the CIA] say[s] there were seven guys, so they must all be militants,' the [Obama administration] official said” (Becker and Shane 2012).

“They want us to be rabbits in their war… But I’m a peaceful man and I don’t want to fight. The government is against us – and Isis and Jabhat al-Nusra want to kill us.” Syrian refugee in Serbia (Kingsley 2015).

“‘It bothers me when [the CIA] say[s] there were seven guys, so they must all be militants,’ the [Obama administration] official said” (Becker and Shane 2012).

“They want us to be rabbits in their war… But I’m a peaceful man and I don’t want to fight. The government is against us – and Isis and Jabhat al-Nusra want to kill us.” Syrian refugee in Serbia (Kingsley 2015).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The kappa statistic “measure[s] the degree of agreement between two raters who rate each of a sample of subjects on a nominal scale… and incorporate a correction for the extent of agreement expected by chance alone” (Fleiss 1971:378).

  2. 2.

    While there is no generally accepted measure of significance for agreement, the following is a common guide:

    “Interpreting Kappa Agreement:

    < 0 Less than chance agreement

    0.01–0.20 Slight agreement

    0.21– 0.40 Fair agreement

    0.41–0.60 Moderate agreement

    0.61–0.80 Substantial agreement

    0.81–0.99 Almost perfect agreement”

    (Viera and Garrett 2005:362).

  3. 3.

    The Uppsala Conflict Data Program defines one-sided violence as “The use of armed force by the government of a state or by a formally organized group against civilians which results in at least 25 deaths in a year. Extrajudicial killings in custody are excluded.” Uppsala Conflict Data Program 2010.

  4. 4.

    Specifically, I interviewed respondents who fought in conflicts in Angola, Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique and Namibia.

  5. 5.

    Essentially, voluntarist accounts are accounts which come from the perspective of the participants in the phenomenon studied (Skocpol 1979:18).

  6. 6.

    Uri Friedman (2014) describes Maskirovka (masking) as the ‘Soviet strategy… which was developed in the 1920s and defined by the Soviet Military Encyclopedia as “complex measures to mislead the enemy regarding the presence and disposition of forces, military objectives, combat readiness and plans.’

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, University of Colorado Denver, Denver, CO, USA

    Betcy Jose

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Jose, B. (2018). Introduction: How Contestation Provides Insight into Normative Behavior. In: Norm Contestation. SpringerBriefs in Political Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69323-1_1

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