Most empirical contributions to the normative power Europe (NPE) debate concentrate on whether and when the EU promotes its core internal norms abroad. In contrast, we investigate how norms emerging from international fora come to be accepted and internalised by the EU in the first place. We examine the case of the emerging responsibility to protect norm (R2P) and argue that the EU's implementation has been more limited and slower than one would expect from the NPE procedural ethics of 'living by example'. We examine the potential reasons for this failure to 'live by example': the role of persuasion by norm entrepreneurs; the role of inducements and costs; the goodness of fit between R2P and existing EU norms; and the clarity of the norm. We find that the lack of goodness of fit and clarity of the norm are important factors, but argue that low levels of bureaucratic receptivity were the greatest obstacle. 1 Manners' (2002) investigation of the case of the prohibition of the death penalty is an exception in empirical terms, but it is also a rather atypical norm as it is unambiguous. Another exception is the study of the EU as a 'shaper' or 'taker' of international regimes, that is, of well-established international norms, in Falkner and Müller's (2014) edited volume. 2 The authors conducted 30 semi-structured interviews with foreign affairs officials and NGOs representatives in Brussels and London and accessed summaries from more than 40 interviews conducted by Task Force members in Paris, Berlin, Rome, Copenhagen, Madrid, Geneva and Berne. In addition, we discussed R2P matters with almost 100 representatives from EU, national governments and NGOs at four workshops. The interview and workshop findings were triangulated with EU official documents and NGO reports about R2P implementation.

Europe is the region of the world where the network of security institutions is the densest. Yet, these institutions did not erase differences about conceptions of force employment among European countries and between European countries and the United States. Why have concepts of military power and force employment remained distinct and varied in Europe, and yet, what facilitates their convergence at the European Union level into the ambiguous notion of crisis management? We argue that an important answer to these questions is endogenous to the military: both role conceptions and organizational frames of military institutions are key underlying aspects of the differences at the national level and of the common ground at the European Union level. We examine and compare empirically the role conceptions and organizational frames of the armed forces in France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom since the early 1990s.

Observers have classified the European Union (EU) as reluctant in its implementation of the "Responsibility to Protect" (R2P) (Task Force on the EU Prevention of Mass Atrocities, 2013). This contribution revisits that argument by employing a more nuanced interpretation of norm implementation than the binary conceptualisation typically applied. By appraising EU reactions to the 2011 Libyan crisis, we investigate whether a "European practice of mass atrocity prevention" is emerging and if so how this relates-or not-to R2P. We do this by investigating EU practices seeking to protect people from genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes and crimes against humanity-paying particular attention to the three pillars and four policy areas included in the R2P framework (ICISS, 2001). Our review of EU responses to Libya seeks to unveil whether and if so how EU practice related to mass atrocity prevention in that country rejected, adopted or indeed adapted R2P. The enquiry appraises both how R2P mattered to the EU response and how the Libya crisis affected the Union's approach to mass atrocity prevention and within it R2P. In this way, the study asks how norms can change practice, but also how practice can change norms. As such, our focus is on the inter-relationship between principles and practices of protection.

Prophecy usually goes right over my head. Still, it sounds grim what she said.Oh what good do prophets ever bring? They tinge with terror the simplest thing.-Aiskhylos, Agamemnon, - Warnings fascinate and puzzle in equal measure. Storytellers and poets going back to ancient Greece have woven powerful narratives around the futility of warnings: either deluded men in power do not listen to accurate warnings, as in the seminal case of Cassandra in ancient Greek epic poems and tragedies like Aiskhylos' Agamemnon in the quote above, or action taken to avoid a prophecy fulfils it, as in the story of Oedipus. Contemporary scholars and policy-makers alike are less fatalistic about warnings. Scholars, in particular, have applied diverse disciplinary lenses in their attempts to persuade leaders of the validity of their claims about future harm. These have ranged across sociological approaches to both man-made and natural disasters, business and management studies of the consequences of malfeasance and mismanagement, technology and engineering assessments of industrial accidents and analyses by political scientists of public policy fiascos and strategic surprises in security and defence.  Nowadays, warning is a regularised and well-resourced professional practice in many organisations and political systems. In the European Union alone, researchers found more than eighty warning systems in operation that cover diverse threats and risks in areas of food safety, air traffic and flood management.  Since the mass atrocities committed in Bosnia and Rwanda in the mid-s, warning for the purpose of 

The paper takes stock of the debate about the so‐called warning‐response‐gap regarding armed conflict within states. It argues that while the existing literature has focused strongly on “better prediction,” it has neglected the analysis of the conditions under which warnings are being noticed, accepted, prioritized and responded to by policy‐makers. This has led to a simplistic understanding of how communicative, cognitive and political processes involving a range of actors can influence both the perception as well as the response to warnings. The paper also criticizes that many normative judgments about the desirability of preventive action are suffering from hindsight bias and insufficient attention to balancing problems related to risk substitution, opportunity costs and moral hazard. In response to these deficits, the paper puts forward a modified model of warning as a persuasive process. It can help us to ascertain under what circumstances warning succeed in overcoming cognitive and political barriers to preventive action and to help establishing benchmarks for assessing success and failure from a normative perspective.

The so-called practice turn in International Relations (IR) has established a new paradigm that puts practitioners' quotidian doings front and centre of IR theorizing. It is proving to be an influential development also for area studies (AS) that share much of IR's scholarship and objects of study. This is certainly the case for European studies (ES) where the works of International Practice Theory (IPT) scholars has greatly contributed to raise attention to situated, mundane, and everyday practices of EU institutions. This article reviews the contribution of IPT scholars to ES to assess the added value of this research agenda and its potential to become a ‘trading zone’ where IR and ES/AS scholars can advance understanding of how the local and the global connect. It also identifies two challenges that have not been adequately addressed in the extant literature: (1) finding ways to theorize and empirically observe the transition from the level of situated practices to EU-wide doings (generalization challenge); and (2) assessing the exact role of interaction in structuring and transforming both the global and the local (challenge of relationism). The article ends by calling for a global practice theory as a way to tackle these two challenges.

This paper aims at posing the basis for a new conceptualization of the impact of ‘old’ and ‘new’ media in international politics by creating a dialogue between the practice theoretical approach in IR (Adler and Pouliot 2011) and the medium theory in media studies (Meyrowitz 1985). Building on these approaches, the paper argues that in order to understand the role of the media in international politics it is necessary to shift the focus from media outlets and organisations to the media as environments, and from media content to media ecology. In fact, the paper argues that changes in the media ecology can produce changes in the social settings where international practices develop. It particular, it argues that the media ecology can affect the articulation of public and private and lead to the emergence of international practices where appropriate and competent behaviour reconstitute the private in the public (and vice versa). To explore its theoretical claims further and clarify how useful this approach can be to understand the role of the media in the Middle East, the paper discusses how an Israeli/Iranian movement catalysed by a Facebook (FB) page attempts at fostering peace. It explains how such a group has developed a Transnational Activist Network (TAN) bringing people together through shared private experiences.

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