Discussion about, and analysis of, the question of definition and the third sector and civil society more generally has developed to a significant degree in recent years. This paper can be located in a new phase of recent research, which seeks to attend to the historical, cultural and politically contingent nature of this domain’s boundaries. The process of constituting the sector is discussed as the product of new discourses of decontestation and contention within third sector policy and practice. It takes England as a case study, drawing on evidence and argument assembled by the authors in recent and ongoing research efforts, variously conducted with the support of the Third Sector Research Centre (TSRC) and the European Commission. The paper proceeds by discussing relevant literature; describing recent patterns of policy institutionalisation; and then tries to draw out more analytically how this process of constitution has been associated not so much with a stable and consistent set of definitions and constructs, but rather with unstable and changing formulations, which reflect the playing out of a dual process of decontestation and contention.

Democracy and liberal democracy, in particular, are at a turning point and the European Union constitutes a fertile ground to study this phenomenon. Although there have been many studies on the crises of democracy, this article aims to make a contribution by concentrating on the nature of the dissensus over liberal democracy. While there is a broad academic consensus that dissensus is “the essence of politics” (Rancière, 2010), it has been rarely studied per se. This is precisely the ambition of this article: to understand the growing dissensus over liberal democracy, or put differently, the lack of consensus over liberal democracy. This article proposes an empirical definition of dissensus supported by a typology of ideal types. The article is organised as follows: Section 2 depicts the phenomenon under consideration and questions whether dissensus can be studied through the lenses of well-established concepts in political science, namely opposition and contestation. Section 3 proposes an empirical definition of dissensus as well as a typology, both coined to enable researchers to understand how the nature of the conflict over liberal democracy and the heterogeneity of actors’ goals can lead to four types of dissensus: mild, constructive, disruptive and destructive. These four ideal-types are then explained and illustrated by concrete examples in references to the principles of liberal democracy and its practice.

This article intervenes in the debates on reforming EU democracy support by offering a “radical reformist” approach. It departs from the observation that literature lacks a sustained theorization of reform which more effectively considers contestation as the very condition of democracy. As such, in contrast to withdrawing democracy from its contested nature, this article presents a theoretical argument, as informed by Chantal Mouffe's take on radical democracy, through which the EU more democratically can engage with and support the plurality of different contestations of democracy. In particular, a closer engagement with the radical democratic embrace of the political will allow for better reflection on how EU democracy support already is or can become democratic, empowering and receptive to the way democracy is understood locally.

Deliberative democracy theorists have long dismissed direct democratic mechanisms, suspecting them of fundamentally contradicting the deliberative ideal. One reason for this dismissal is that, as aggregative devices, all direct democratic institutions would implement a purely procedural view of democracy deemed undesirable. In this article, I contest this objection to all direct democratic procedures by showing that one of them, namely, the facultative referendum, corresponds to Joshua Cohen’s definition of substantive democracy. Moreover, because it introduces uncertainty in the democratic system and replaces hypothetical with actual acceptance of reasons, the facultative referendum gives political actors strong incentives to think in terms of acceptable justifications and can screen outcomes that fit the three principles of Cohen’s deliberative ideal. These findings should encourage deliberative democracy theorists to further develop tools to inform the design and assessment of the growing number of popular votes around the world and ultimately enhance their democratic quality.

Dans la foulée des différentes vagues de mobilisation et de contestation des années 2010, les théories de la démocratie radicale ont permis de réfléchir à nouveaux frais au rapport des mouvements sociaux à la démocratie en les associant à un idéal d’insurrection populaire. Or, il découle de cette association une conception particulière de la conflictualité politique qui est susceptible de renoncer aux promesses pratiques et normatives de la démocratie. S’agissant de dépasser cette conception de la conflictualité politique et de réaffirmer la spécificité de l’apport démocratique des mouvements sociaux, cet article entend étayer l’hypothèse d’une institution insurgeante de la démocratie en soutenant que les mouvements sociaux contribuent par leurs pratiques contestataires à produire et à transformer l’ordre démocratique.

Norm contestation has become a defining characteristic of our time and a major interest in International Relations (IR) scholarship. However, researchers often view contestation as a repudiation of norm socialization and thus overlook the ways in which contestation occurs within socialization. This article advances an interpretive account based on performativity to capture the role of cultural translation and appropriation as practices of contestation within processes of norm socialization. It makes three key interventions. First, it redefines norm socialization as a process of cultural translation rather than straightforward transition. Second, it investigates various strategies through which actors appropriate norms by disjointing a norm’s normative appeal from its normalizing power – its prevalent interpretation. Third, it underscores how such contestations destabilize the relationships of authority and hierarchy in normative engagements. To illustrate the analytical purchase of this framework, the paper analyses the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s discourses of ‘Islamic democracy’ and the ‘Islamic civil state’ as examples of their performative socialization into the norm of democracy. The paper concludes by reflecting on the democratic promise as well as the precariousness of performative socialization in world politics.

Many global norms are currently facing substantial contestation by various actors. While contestation is a regular practice in norm dynamics, it can potentially result in the destabilisation of norms. At the same time, international city networks (ICNs) are increasingly positioning themselves in global governance. While research in International Relations has not analysed how ICNs respond to norm contestation and whether they stabilise existing norms and normative orders, this article demonstrates that ICNs are relevant actors in norm dynamics by focusing on their activities. To examine how ICNs stabilise norms, we employ a theoretical framework based on existing approaches in norm research, which assumes that norms must be as robust, resilient and legitimate as possible to maintain their functions in facilitating individual orientation and collective order. Empirically, we analyse the stabilising activities of three ICNs – Mayors for Peace, Rainbow Cities Network and Fast-Track Cities Initiative – as contributions to preventing norm decay in security, human rights and health. We show that these ICNs stabilise norms by supporting them in discourse and practice, by connecting norms in clusters, and by including affected stakeholders. In sum, we present ICNs as relevant actors in global governance due to their stabilising activities and networked capacities.

This paper aims to analyze the impact of the Incidental Process activated during the UNESCO Memory of the World (MOW) 2022/23 nomination cycle and the Memory of the World Regional Committee for Asia and the Pacific (MOWCAP) 2021/22 nomination cycle. The Incidental Process is a mechanism that allows a Member State to contest nominations submitted by other Member States in the inscription process of the MOW Register. Japan became the first Member State to initiate the Incidental Process in 2022, contesting five nominations submitted by Korea and China. Japan’s initiative, seemingly part of its decade-long campaign, concentrated on identifying the elements in the nominated documents that would evoke the image of perpetrators and removing them from inscription. However, the MOW and MOWCAP responded in different ways to the contestation, which highlighted several contentious issues that were not effectively addressed by the General Guidelines. Furthermore, the disputes surrounding Japan’s contestation revealed the institutional weakness of the International Advisory Committee (IAC), the main operational body of the program. This paper, after examining the extraordinary situations that arose during the MOW and MOWCAP inscription process, attempts to identify the origin of the contentious issues and suggests the need to implement the provisions of the Incidental Process for the future operation of the MOW.

Under what conditions do South American states create regional institutions that consolidate or undermine the liberal international order (LIO)? To address this question, we compare two cases of contestation of the LIO through counter-institutionalization in the domains of migration and election monitoring, both of which are closely related to the LIO’s core political principles. We argue that the variation in the effects of counter-institutionalization—LIO-consolidating in the case of migration and LIO-undermining in the case of election monitoring—results from the interaction of two explanatory factors: the source of dissatisfaction with the LIO’s norms and institutions in a specific domain, and the preferences of the state that exercises regional leadership in support of counter-institutionalization. The article sheds light on the coexistence of liberal and illiberal tendencies in South America’s regionalism and contributes to the debate on the determinants and effects of contestations of the LIO in the Global South.

This article identifies a sub-category of norm contestation I've termed ‘norm weaving’, where actors contest the constitution of norm clusters, instead of the validity of individual norms. This occurs through processes of stretching or reproducing individual strands of existing norm clusters before weaving them together to create behaviour guides in undergoverned issue areas that are greater than the sum of their individual parts. I identify two examples of weaving in the world-leading actions of Fiji and Vanuatu around domestic climate mobilities. Using these two cases, we can see that existing models of norm dynamics need to be developed to better explain and understand weaving-like processes of norm contestation. There are two areas where norm weaving extends our understanding – in how clusters of norms emerge and change, and in how contestation applies to groupings of norms. Clarifying what norm weaving looks like in these cases could open the door to further examples being identified in other contexts and a more complete understanding of how norms operate in global politics.