Normative Change and Security Community Disintegration: Undoing Peace

Product Description
This book develops a theoretical and empirical argument about the disintegration of security communities, and the subsequent breakdown of stable peace among nations, through a process of norm degeneration. It draws together two key bodies of contemporary IR literature – norms and security communities – and brings their combined insights to bear on the empirical phenomenon of disintegration.

The investigation of normative change in IR is becoming increasingly popular. Most studies, however, focus on its progressive connotation. The possibility of a weakening or even disappearance of an established peaceful normative order, by contrast, tends to be often either neglected or implicitly assumed. Normative Change and Security Community Disintegration: Undoing Peace advances the contemporary body of research on the important role of norms and ideas by analytically extending recent Constructivist arguments about international norm degeneration to the regional level and by applying them to a particular type of regional order – a security community.
Review
“A sophisticated and sound study on how security communities start to fall apart. Simon Koschut’s Undoing Peace is a welcomed contribution to a field which has focused almost exclusively on the construction and strengthening of security communities. This work dealing with norm degeneration and community disintegration comes to fill an important gap, and does so in a theoretically sound and empirically convincing way.” (Andrea Oelsner, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, University of Aberdeen, UK) “The scholarship on security communities is predominantly optimistic about their ability to survive external shocks. Koschut argues against the conventional wisdom that security communities can actually degenerate under particular conditions. He develops a four-stage model for the disintegration of security communities and evaluates it empirically with regard to the German Federation and NATO. An excellent contribution which substantially advances our understanding of security communities!” (Thomas Risse, Professor of International Relations, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany)


From the Back Cover
This book develops a theoretical and empirical argument about the disintegration of security communities, and the subsequent breakdown of stable peace among nations, through a process of norm degeneration. It draws together two key bodies of contemporary IR literature – norms and security communities – and brings their combined insights to bear on the empirical phenomenon of disintegration.
The investigation of normative change in IR is becoming increasingly popular. Most studies, however, focus on its progressive connotation. The possibility of a weakening or even disappearance of an established peaceful normative order, by contrast, tends to be often either neglected or implicitly assumed. Normative Change and Security Community Disintegration: Undoing Peace advances the contemporary body of research on the important role of norms and ideas by analytically extending recent Constructivist arguments about international norm degeneration to the regional level and by applying them to a particular type of regional order – a security community.
About the Author
Simon Koschut is a Visiting Professor in International Relations and European Integration at the Otto Suhr Institute at the Freie Universität Berlin. Previously, he was Assistant Professor at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg and Fritz Thyssen Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University.