Skip to main content
Palgrave Macmillan
Book cover

Normative Change and Security Community Disintegration

Undoing Peace

  • Book
  • © 2016

Overview

  • Presents an innovative empirical and theoretical framework arguing that the disintegration of security communities leads to the breakdown of peace through norm degeneration

  • Two key bodies of IR literature are brought together: norms and security communities

  • Analytically extends Constructivist arguments on international norm degeneration to the regional level

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this book

eBook USD 19.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book USD 27.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access

Licence this eBook for your library

Institutional subscriptions

Table of contents (5 chapters)

Keywords

About this book

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.

Reviews

“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)

Authors and Affiliations

  • Otto Suhr Institute for Political Scienc, Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Nürnberg, Germany

    Simon Koschut

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.

Bibliographic Information

Publish with us