Prof. Phil Orchard1, Prof Sara Davies, Dr Liam Moore, Prof Jacqui True, Dr Carla Winston, Ruji Auethavornpipat
1University of Wollongong, Australia
Biography:
Dr Sara E. Davies is Deputy Director (Indo-Pacific Research) the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the Elimination of Violence against Women and is a Professor of International Relations at Griffith University. She has published widely on these topics in including Nature, The Lancet, Review of International Political Economy, and International Studies Quarterly.
Liam Moore is a lecturer in International Politics and Policy at James Cook University, Australia. Liam’s work is grounded in a broad understanding of what International Relations is and should be. He has published with journals including, International Theory, the Australian Journal of International Affairs, and Forced Migration Review, and also regularly contributes to pieces in The Conversation.
Phil Orchard is Professor of International Relations at the University of Wollongong and Co-Director of the Future of Rights Centre. His books include A Right to Flee: Refugees, States, and the Construction of International Cooperation (CUP, 2014), Protecting the Internally Displaced: Rhetoric and Reality (Routledge, 2018) and. co-edited with Antje Wiener, Contesting the World: Norm Research in Theory and Practice (CUP, 2024).
Professor Jacqui True, FASSA, FAIIA is Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the Elimination of Violence against Women (CEVAW) and Professor of International Relations at Monash University. Most recently she published, Hidden Wars: Gendered Violence in Asia’s Civil Conflicts (2024) and co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Women, Peace and Security (2019) (with Sara E. Davies).
Carla Winston is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Melbourne. She is interested in norms and norm diffusion, complexity theory, human rights and transitional justice. Previous work has appeared in the European Journal of International Relations, International Studies Quarterly, The Journal of Human Rights, and Interest Groups and Advocacy.
Ruji Auethavornpipat is a Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at La Trobe University, Australia. His research examines the contestation of global migrant protection norms at sites of implementation, especially in Southeast Asia and Europe. His recent project investigates the interplay between rule of law backsliding and the fundamental rights of migrants in the European Union.
Abstract:
Norms research in international relations has developed sufficiently over the past thirty-five years to become its own sub-discipline within the field, with its own a corresponding ‘toolbox’ of concepts, approaches, and methods which have often resulted from debates representing distinct perspectives on how norms matter for IR as a field and for global international relations more generally. Even so, three groups of enduring questions continue to sit at the heart of norms research: first, the processes by which norms emerge, change or disappear, on the one hand, and by which they are contested, violated, diffused, or replaced on the other; second, the agency of actors at sites on the macro-, meso-, or micro-scale of global order, and who engages with these processes; and third, the embeddedness or interaction of norms with other pre-existing norms and structures such as the prevailing rules of engagement and clusters of normative meaning. This roundtable brings together five of the Australian-based contributors to the forthcoming Oxford Handbook on Norms Research in International Relations (edited by Sassan Gholiagha, Phil Orchard, and Antje Wiener) to discuss how these questions continue to influence norms research today and into the future.