What does not kill me makes me stronger: how violations can strengthen international norms

O'Mahoney, J. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6316-1771 (2026) What does not kill me makes me stronger: how violations can strengthen international norms. International Studies Quarterly. ISSN 1468-2478 (In Press)

Abstract/Summary

When India’s 1974 nuclear test violated the nonproliferation norm represented by the new Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), observers feared the norm was finished. And yet, after the test, the norm grew stronger. More states ratified the treaty, more international institutions were created by nuclear supplier states to restrict nuclear exports, more safeguards were required on the whole nuclear fuel cycle, and suppliers agreed not to export plutonium reprocessing technology. How did this norm violation produce a stronger norm? This paper shows that unexpected norm violations can galvanize actors who value the norm through three mechanisms: making the norm issue internationally salient and coordinating collective attention; radically increasing the perception of the threat of future norm violations; and making actors conceptually reconstruct what the problem of violation is and how to address it. Drawing on original archival evidence from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, and time-series newspaper data across all three countries, the paper shows how India’s test produced fear of more states acquiring a nuclear explosive capability, more attention in the form of newspaper articles, legislation on nuclear exports, and nonproliferation policy reviews, and widened the scope of the norm to include stricter controls on enrichment and reprocessing technology. The paper contributes a microfoundational account of how violations can overcome collective action barriers, and identifies unexpectedness as a novel and theoretically grounded variable explaining when norm violations strengthen rather than erode international norms.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/id/eprint/130866
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Politics, Economics and International Relations > Politics and International Relations
Publisher	Oxford University Press
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