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Norm Socialisation: Localising the Global, Regionalising the Local

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The International Politics of Human Trafficking

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Abstract

This chapter continues to follow through the norm lifecycle model, with an emphasis on exploring the part of the cycle where norm internalisation is said to occur through the interaction of international norms with domestic politics. The case study at the heart of this chapter concerns the impact of transnational, regional and local lobbying on the elaboration of anti-trafficking politics and norms in the two jurisdictions on the island of Ireland.

Norm socialisation theory usually assumes that international norms are transposed downwards through processes of elite socialisation. A key example of this is the EU and the conditionality it (usually) successfully imposes on its member states’ domestic order. Undoubtedly EU trafficking directives do influence domestic legal and political frameworks. Moreover, because the EU’s approach is primarily focused on sex trafficking and increasingly abolitionist concerning prostitution, this stance permeates the approach of many member states. Again however, this chapter demonstrates that the lifecycle model does not capture the messiness of the real political world of norm adoption and the fact that local conditions will facilitate, or not, whether a norm is taken up, reshaped or rejected in particular contexts (Acharya 2004).

The case study drawn from the Irish context reveals the importance of local mores in shaping norm socialisation. In both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, domineering civil society coalitions pursued anti-sex trafficking abolitionism. The two lobbies do possess differing bases—with the Republic’s coalition dominated by radical feminism and the North’s by evangelical Protestantism—but the enthusiasm for the abolitionist cause is shared. Visits to and from Sweden, as the state seen to possess exemplary laws in the form a sex purchase ban, also fired local enthusiasm for a particular version of ‘norm taking’.

In effect this chapter traces how norm socialisation occurs not just from ‘the top down’ but also in the interaction between regional political frameworks with domestic political campaigns and regional civil society networks.

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  1. Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

    Gillian Wylie

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Wylie, G. (2016). Norm Socialisation: Localising the Global, Regionalising the Local. In: The International Politics of Human Trafficking. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-37775-3_5

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