Norm Robustness and Contestation in International Law: Self-Defense against Nonstate Actors
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using the example of the right to self-defense under customary international law, we engage with questions concerning the linkage between norm robustness and legality. We draw out important differences between validity contestation and applicatory contestation within law. In so doing, we connect the international relations (IR) debate over norm robustness with our framework of interactional international law, bringing together constructivist insights into social normativity and a theory of international legality. We hypothesize that norms that meet the requirements of legality and are upheld by practices of legality enjoy “validity” and “facticity” (as defined by Deitelhoff and Zimmermann) and are “robust.” This model reveals that law operates through a continuing process of contestation. The requirements of legality impose a discipline, such that legal contestation will normally be applicatory contestation. Through practices of legality, therefore, legal norms can be maintained or shifted. However, legal norms may decay when practices of legality weaken or when challenges amount to validity contestation. The currently heightened contestation surrounding the circumstances under which the right to self-defense can be exercised against nonstate actors allows us to explore and illustrate of these dynamics.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it