Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: How have relatively weak state and non-state actors been able to exert massive coercive pressure on the US and other great powers, particularly when powerful states frequently have trouble coercing far weaker ones? This paper offers one possible answer to this question. Namely, it hypothesizes that under certain conditions weak actors turn the normative strengths and ethical virtues of liberal states on their heads and use these virtues as weapons against them; in short, they engage in a kind of norms-driven political jujitsu against their more powerful opponents. The paper further hypothesizes that weak actors are frequently successful in their attempted use of this kind of coercion, particularly in those cases where liberal states are publicly perceived as failing to uphold their own self-proclaimed norms and ethical standards. Beyond presenting the precepts of this theory of norms-driven coercion and deriving its key hypotheses, this paper tests the theory (and its cross-issue generalizability) by applying it to a series of diverse case studies, namely 1) a trade-related case-i.e., British weapons sales to Indonesia in the early 1990s; 2) an insurgency-related case-i.e., Vietnam in the late 1960s; 3) a migration crisis-related case-i.e., the East German refugee crisis of 1953; and 4) the Iraqi Abu-Ghraib prison scandal in 2004.