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Scholarship on states’ responses to international norms has focused on commitment, compliance, and noncompliance; paying insufficient attention to responses that fall outside these categories. Beyond simply complying with or violating a norm; states contest, resist, and respond to international norms in a range of ways. I identifyrhetorical adaptationas a central form of resistance to international norms. Rather than simply rejecting a norm or charges of norm violation, such a strategy draws on a norm’s content to resist pressures for compliance or minimize perceptions of violation. Theorizing the relationship between norms’ content and states’ resistant rhetoric, I identify four types of rhetorical adaptation: norm disregard, norm avoidance, norm interpretation, and norm signaling. To probe the plausibility of these propositions, a case study of Turkey’s post-World War II narrative of the Armenian Genocide traces a sequence of rhetorical adaptations over the past six decades. Building on the case study, I then draw out generalizable insights into the uses and effects of rhetorical adaptation. Connecting theoretical concerns in political science with the interdisciplinary fields of genocide studies and memory studies, I delineate the ways in which actors instrumentally use norms and expand understandings of the forms and effects of so-called norm takers’ agency.

Analyzing the politics of the past in the context of the Armenian Genocide reveals an evolving interplay between international norms, official narratives, and broader discourses. This short essay explores three aspects of these interrelationships. First, I draw on my own research to highlight the ways in which changes in Turkey's narrative of the genocide—typically referred to in official discourse assözde Ermeni sorunu(the so-called Armenian question), or more recently as1915 olayları(the events of 1915)—have to some extent paralleled shifts in the meaning and salience of the norm against genocide. Second, I note key ways in which the Turkish state's official discourse has shaped public understandings—within and, to a lesser extent, outside Turkey—of the nature of the violence against Ottoman Armenians. Third, I suggest that in influencing public understandings of the relationship between this event and the concept of genocide, Turkey's official narrative has the potential to affect understandings of the meaning of genocide more generally.

What constitutes a strong or a weak norm? Scholars often refer to strong or weak, or strengthening or weakening norms, yet there are widespread inconsistencies in terminology and no agreed-upon measures. This has hindered the accumulation of knowledge and made it difficult to test competing hypotheses about norm development and contestation. To address these conceptual problems and their analytical implications, this article conceptualizes norm strength as the extent of collective expectations related to a principled idea and proposes two indicators to assess a norm’s strength: the level of international concordance with a principled idea, and the degree of international institutionalization of a principled idea. The article illustrates the applicability and utility of the proposed conceptualization by evaluating the strengths of two transitional justice norms: the norm of legal accountability and the norm of truth-seeking. In so doing, the article resolves empirical disputes over the origins and status of these norms. In particular, the analysis reveals that while legal accountability became a norm in the early 1990s and is today a strong norm, truth-seeking emerged later and remains a weak norm. More generally, the proposed framework should advance existing debates about norm contestation, localization, violation, and erosion.