3 Theoretical Framework

1.
3 Theoretical Framework
The concept of vernacularization grew out of the academic literature on norms, which spans
political science, sociology, and anthropology. In the field of international politics specifically,
which is the empirical domain of this study, the literature on norms includes many case studies
on the formulation and dissemination of human rights. Although a focus on norms is compatible
with a realist framework treating them as endogenous functions of states’ material interests, the
majority of norm scholars are constructivists who contend that norms are at least partially
exogenous factors shaping the social context that forms states’ contingent identities and interests
(Wunderlich 2013, 21-22). I have assumed such a constructivist outlook in this thesis.
Norm theorists generally agree on the definition of a norm as “a standard of appropriate behavior
for actors with a given identity” (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998, 891). Recent scholarship on the
role of norms in international politics is vast, but one can roughly divide it into two distinct
waves (Wunderlich 2013, 23). The first focused primarily on the genesis and spread of norms, as
exemplified by Finnemore and Sikkink (1998), who popularized the concepts of norm
emergence, cascade, and internalization, referring to the authors’ three proposed stages of a
norm’s “life cycle.” In the realm of human rights, influential models of rights diffusion such as
the “boomerang effect” proposed by Keck and Sikkink (1998) and the “spiral model” proposed
by Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink (1999) followed this general approach, seeking to explain the
process by which transnational networks of human rights activists have successfully pressured
authoritarian states to accept a variety of rights claims. While these studies formed important
contributions towards understanding the diffusion of human rights
norms across the international system, they were generally static in nature, describing change in
regards only to states’ attitudes toward human rights, not the content of the norms themselves.
The second wave of norm literature responded to this gap, attempting to explain not only patterns
of norm diffusion but also evolving understandings of what adherence to a given norm entails—
of what kind of behavior constitutes torture (Liese 2009), for instance, or what kind of policies
promote gender equality (Krook and True 2012). The premise of such studies is the observation
that broadly supported norms tend to be vague, “enabling their content to be filled in many ways
and thereby to be appropriated for a variety of different purposes” (ibid., 104).
It is useful to view vernacularization in this context as a theoretical elaboration of one possible

mechanism by which norms evolve. Merry and Levitt (2017, 213) define this process as “the
extraction of ideas and practices from the universal sphere of international organizations, and
their translation into ideas and practices that resonate with the values and ways of doing things in
local contexts.” Described in these terms the process sounds rather innocuous, although the
authors do hint at the possibility of it resulting in what liberal human rights activists are likely to
view as failed or flawed adaptations. For instance, they write that abortion debates “can be
framed as the opposition between the right to life and the right to choose,” which illustrates the
potentially counterproductive “malleability of human rights as a discourse of claims-making”
(235). Yet they do not investigate this possibility further, dismissing “the risk of
vernacularization that deviates from human rights principles” simply as “the price of
vernacularization that makes them more appealing in particular cultural contexts” (ibid.). In
short, then, the theoretical aspiration of this thesis is to analyze illiberal rights claims as instances
of vernacularization within contexts that are predominantly authoritarian, aiming to provide a
fuller and more systematic account of the characteristics of such “deviate” human rights
interpretations, as well as their possible implications for the future advocacy of the transnational
human rights regime.

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It is useful to view vernacularization in this context as a theoretical elaboration of one possible

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