Norm Compromise and Polarization: The Advancement of Abortion and SOGI in the UN

• In Event: Making Rights Claims: Environment, Land, Gender, and Sexuality - Who Claims and How?

Abstract

What is driving differing levels of norm emergence for contentious human rights issues? Advocacy networks, supportive states, and UN bodies have worked to strengthen the legitimacy of controversial issues like abortion and sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) as human rights norms. However, efforts to constitute these contentious issues as international human rights have also yielded differing levels of impact and have resulted in substantial contestation and backlash.

This paper seeks to identify the causal processes through which emergent human rights issues become constituted as normative claims by tracing the processes through which SOGI and abortion have advanced as human rights norms through UN bodies. Drawing from interviews with diplomats, UN representatives, and civil society leaders; from archival document analysis; and from participant observation, this paper argues that norm polarization has become a more common outcome of negotiations on contentious issues due in part to institutional changes in how human rights negotiations take place.

Global conferences and the iterative, multi-level negotiations and convenings that preceded them in the 1990’s afforded states the opportunity to engage in in-depth and at times transformative dialogue and negotiations; it was in this context that the high-water mark for articulating a (heavily caveated) norm regarding the right to abortion was made possible.

SOGI, in contrast, has emerged as an increasingly salient human rights issue from the 2010’s onwards. During this contemporary period, structures of human rights negotiations – namely, through annual negotiations based largely on instructions sent from nations’ capitals – has exacerbated the tendency for SOGI to be seen as a predictable, polarizing, North-South issue. While gradual inroads have taken place and are likely to continue, it is improbable that states in either camp will agree on compromise language through which some formulation of SOGI can be articulated as a universal human rights norm (as had been the case with abortion). As a result, the prospects for SOGI be to mainstreamed across other UN processes remains limited, whereas venues through which to advance the issue of abortion – albeit in a very compromised formulation – are more numerous and are more ably negotiated by transnational advocacy networks and norm entrepreneurs.

These findings are novel in the IR literature insofar as they contribute to the developing literature on norm polarization by further elucidating the mechanisms underpinning polarization. More specifically, these findings illustrate how changes to institutional processes such as the structure of negotiations can shape the likelihood of whether norm polarization or norm compromise may occur.

Author

• Erin Aylward, University of Toronto