Introduction

Contemporary scholarship on international mediation has extensively examined a wide range of material-based factors that motivate and condition mediators’ involvement. Yet in shaping specific outcomes mediators also inevitably promote, invoke and/or safeguard specific ideational aspects, such as principles, norms and values, which may be threatened by an escalating conflict (Vuković and Hopmann, 2019). Promotion of new norms in circumstances where a related norm has already been contested by participating actors represents a form of norm diffusion. Norm diffusion has been studied on case-to-case basis as a distinct dynamic that shapes and guides conflict management processes. These studies have ranged from reflections on the role civil society can play in such processes (Boesenecker and Vinjamuri, 2011) to how specific countries may use norm diffusion to advance their own normative agenda (Björkdahl, 2007; Kurusu, 2018), as well as how norms can be diffused through specific global practices such as peacekeeping (Björkdahl, 2006), responsibility to protect (Jacob, 2018) and post-conflict peacebuilding (Tholens and Groß, 2015). While all these studies are unequivocally insightful and rich in detail, they highlight an important limitation: namely that there is no commonly agreed-upon taxonomy on how norm diffusion unfolds, and which methods/mechanism norm diffusion encompasses. So far, the gold standard used to explain norm diffusion comes from the seminal work by Finnemore and Sikkink, who looked at the norm dynamics through three stages: emergence, cascade and internalization. In the first phase, the norm emerges once the norm entrepreneur frames the issue saliency, offers a specific language for it, and as a consequence formulates an alternative norm that creates new perceptions of appropriateness and related interests (Finnemore and Sikkink, 1998: 897). Once the parties accept the new norm, they gradually become an integral part of a socialization process that punishes confrontational and deviant behaviour, and rewards cooperation and coordination between actors. In the last phase, once the norm has been adequately integrated into the existing normative framework, it may be fully internalized by the parties, consequently making it both commonsense and the only form of appropriate behaviour. As will be highlighted in this chapter, mediators go through the same three phases when they want to get their normative ideas diffused.