Gholiagha, Sassan/ Sienknecht, Mitja 2025: “‘It’s what you ought to do’ – Appropriateness as a central concept in norms research”, in: Gholiagha, Sassan/ Orchard, Phil/ Wiener, Antje (Eds.): The Oxford Handbook on Norms Research, p. 136-148.
Appropriateness is a central building block of norms research. However, despite the concept’s centrality, it often remains a ‘black box’ and thus is under-theorized in current norms research. To close this gap, this chapter proposes to unpack appropriateness as a key concept in norms research. To this end, it makes a two-fold argument. First, it argues that scholars need to distinguish between the logic of appropriateness, appropriate behaviour, and appropriateness to gain conceptual clarity between the three different configurations of what constitutes the oughtness of a norm. By distinguishing between the three configurations, it becomes possible to assess how actors are behaving (the logic of appropriateness), what specific kind of behaviour they are displaying in a given situation (appropriate behaviour), and why actors are behaving in a certain way (appropriateness). Second, we argue for distinguishing between three different dimensions of appropriateness: legal, political, and sociocultural. Such a distinction offers a more nuanced understanding of actors’ behaviour in relation to the respective dimension of appropriateness on which different actors might focus. This chapter illustrates the usefulness of this differentiated conceptualization of appropriateness with brief empirical illustrations from drug control policy and international peace and security.
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