The Cynic’s Guide to Compliance: A Constructivist Theory of the Contestation Threshold in Human Rights
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Wherever the reader may sit on the spectrum of international relations theories, it should hold that whether a state complies with international human rights norms or not translates some other reality beyond the simple act of (non-)conformity. Focusing on such social meanings, constructivism allows to demonstrate how compliance is constitutive of normativity. We combine this constructivist approach with a jaded outlook in order to find out the role contestation, compliance’s cynical ugly twin, plays in normativity. This paper exploits empirical observations concerning contestation in order to address its normative implications, arguing that, up to a certain point contestation nourishes normativity as the norm is taken seriously enough to contest, but that beyond the contestation threshold it becomes damaging. Taking the norms at three stages of implementation, we evaluate their contestation, and therefore, normativity levels. Firstly, we compare UN resolutions on LGBTI+ rights and the right to development as social norms by inspecting voting records. Secondly, we study non-ratifications and reservations made to UN human rights treaties as normativity indicators for emergent legal norms, acknowledging the latter’s unique challenges. Lastly, we take a look at violations of these same treaties as contestation of an established legal norm while questioning the viability of treaty body decisions as a normativity indicator. We conclude that, providing the right indicator is chosen, the contestation threshold is a particularly useful tool when it comes to comparing two or more norms at the same stage of implementation, and only for comparison purposes until the threshold is better quantified.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.025 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.110 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.019 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.017 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".