This study is a response to the observation that people articulate meanings of rules in flexible and context-specific ways, but that literature on international legal, norm-based, strategic-logical, and ethical/moral rules typically treats them as pregiven, stable objects. By examining people’s evolving justifications of practices related to firefighting (protecting against and rebuilding after conflagration) and fire setting (debating the appropriate use of incendiary munitions during armed conflict), the project demonstrates that the meaning of rules is flexibly constructed as they are applied in action. People make sense of the social world and construct meanings of rules by rhetorically invoking rules concepts to elicit particular behavior from others. This project examines how such invocations of rules, related to specific fire events, gives context-specific meaning to general criteria for judging appropriate action. I explore rhetorical rule-meaning-making through the empirical lens of responses to fire events partly because human affairs have taken countless unexpected turns on account of people succeeded in harnessing, responding to, and making sense of fire in pioneering ways and partly because fire events touch human life beyond narrow disciplinary boundaries and levels of analysis. These political histories of fire demonstrate that shifts in dominant notions of appropriate conduct in urban design and planning, public service provision, organization of state bureaucracies, state culpability, and international law draw on and tap into rules concepts from a diverse array of areas of life. By invoking rules to justify actions, people leverage the authority and claimed universality of rules concepts to elicit specific actions and to legitimize behavioral prescriptions. Historically, doing so has also contested presumed-to-be-stable existing rules (including international norms and law) and enabled the formation of innovative configurations of domestic governance, international institutions, and new constellations of conceptions of appropriate conduct. Starting from Wittgenstein’s observation that rules cannot directly govern action and drawing on recent scholarship on rhetorical adaptations of international norms, I argue the ways people invoke rules in practice constitute the resources through which the meaning of rules (often wrongly taken to be relatively stable) is produced and negotiated. Rather than merely delimiting what is allowed or prohibited, rhetorical invocations of rules concepts change the meaning of the rules they purport to reference. A rhetorical approach to international politics—which demands scholars rethink assumptions about the internal coherence of rules, global processes of normative change, and the relationship among rhetorics from a number of areas of life and across levels of analysis—uncovers social processes through which rules meanings are generated and which are underexplored by dominant scholarship on international norms and law.

Creator

• Dijmarescu, Horia M.

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-kcyy-r951

Subject

• International relations
• Political science

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:15055
• etdadmin_upload_736297

Keyword

• incendiary munitions
• conflagrations
• rules
• rhetoric

Date created

• 2020-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright