By Adam Fejerskov, Lars Engberg Pedersen, Meron Zeleke, and Dereje Feyissa

Something deep is shifting in how normative authority operates globally. Economic power increasingly lies outside the traditional Western core, new institutional arrangements challenge established multilateral structures, and debates at the UN reveal fundamental disagreements over what counts as universal. Yet much of how we study and practice international norm promotion still assumes a stable hierarchy – enlightened centers producing norms that cascade to peripheral contexts. The gap between this framework and contemporary realities raises a question: what if we’ve been thinking about normative orders in the wrong way all along? 

In our new book, we propose an alternative: instead of hierarchical diffusion from center to periphery, we should understand normative orders as networks of interconnected nodes. Each node – whether the UN Commission on the Status of Women in New York, a courtroom in Addis Ababa, a community gathering in Ethiopia’s Afar region, or African Union headquarters – represents a situated point where actors engage with norms in ways shaped by specific contexts, power relations, and historical trajectories.

Think of it less like a traditional hierarchy and more like a network where different sites maintain their own situated legitimacy. This isn’t relativism – nodes are interconnected and influence each other – but it distributes authority rather than concentrating it in a supposed ‘global’ center. What makes a node? Three elements are crucial: actors with their own positions and preferences navigating multiple social environments; spaces shaped by institutions and material conditions; and temporality, where past habits, present demands, and future imaginings collide.

This multi-nodal perspective draws on what is called pluriversal thinking – recognizing not just many perspectives on one world, but many kinds of worlds. This isn’t merely epistemological (different ways of knowing the same reality) but ontological (different realities themselves). Gender, violence, or rights don’t exist as singular things onto which groups apply varying interpretations. They mean fundamentally different things to different people.

As scholars from Bruno Latour to Arturo Escobar to Donna Haraway have shown, realities are historical, contextual, and situated. All knowledge production, in this view, is idiographic – shaped by the particularities of specific contexts. When international institutions declare certain norms ‘universal moral claims,’ they may inadvertently be universalizing particular perspectives while marginalizing other ontologies.

Our fieldwork for the book examine norms around violence against women across multiple Ethiopian, American and European sites illustrates this complexity. Courts navigate between constitutional mandates to enforce international human rights instruments and recognition of local practices’ validity. Communities in the Ethiopian region of Afar interpret marital rape through religious and cultural lenses that can’t be reduced to ‘non-compliance’ with global standards. Intermediaries trying to prevent child marriage find themselves caught between intergovernmental directives and local realities. Higher education institutions like Addis Ababa University sometimes perpetuate Eurocentric gender frameworks while overlooking indigenous practices that might offer effective alternatives.

These aren’t failures of diffusion so much as evidence of different ontologies coexisting, sometimes in tension, sometimes finding partial connections. The question becomes not how to better transmit universal norms, but how to understand normative engagement as occurring between different worlds rather than different views of the same world.

This shift has implications. When we recognize that ‘global’ norms are situated knowledges from particular contexts, we must ask different questions: Whose voices shape what counts as legitimate? How do power dynamics within and between nodes enable or constrain norm evolution? What gets lost when certain frameworks are privileged over others? African Union debates about positive masculinity, UN commission negotiations shaped by cultural conflicts, social and behavioral change summits – these all reveal normative orders in flux, where no single node can claim automatic authority.

Decolonizing norm research, in this view, means distributing privileges rather than embedding them in central structures. It means taking seriously the situated legitimacy of different nodal points without assuming some necessarily dominate others. It means analyzing ‘meanings-in-use’ – how people understand norms in concrete situations, which may differ from abstract formulations. It means attending to processes, events, and norm histories that shape how actors reflexively engage with norms.

We were never global – not in the sense of universal norms transcending context, not in the sense of hierarchical diffusion from enlightened centers to backward peripheries, not in the sense of a single world onto which different interpretations are projected. But we are interconnected through networks of partial connections, where different nodes influence each other in dynamic, non-linear ways.

This calls for a more intimate approach to the transnational, one marked by spatial displacements, temporal disjunctions, and relational networks. It requires studying how normative assemblages emerge from shifting dynamics between material, narrative, social, and geographic elements specific to each node. It suggests abandoning linear, progressive models of norm change for analyses attentive to contingency, conjuncture, and historical legacies.

Situations matter. Contexts change. Actors navigate multiple ontologies, not through a simple logic of appropriateness, but as competent, reflexive beings who interpret and shape norms’ meanings. If we’re serious about advancing gender equality, combating violence, or achieving any normative goals, we might first need to recognize the pluriverse we actually inhabit – many worlds, each with its own legitimacy, each connected but never fully merged into a singular global whole.

The question then becomes not how to better diffuse universal norms, but how to build more equitable relationships between different nodes of normative engagement, respecting their situated knowledges while fostering productive connections. That project begins by acknowledging what the evidence increasingly suggests: what we thought of as the ‘global’ has in many respects always been another ‘local’. And recognizing that fact may be the first step toward more honest, more effective approaches to addressing the challenges that do connect us across contexts.We Were Never Global: Rethinking Normative Orders Through Multi-Nodal Engagement brings together fieldwork from Ethiopia and international institutions to challenge conventional wisdom about norm diffusion. Through case studies on violence against women, the volume demonstrates how attention to situated realities, power dynamics, and ontological multiplicity offers a more nuanced understanding of how norms actually work in our interconnected but never unified world.

This article was written by Adam Moe Fejerskov, Senior Researcher, Lars Engberg-Pedersen, Senior Researcher, Danish Institute for International Studies, Denmark Meron Zeleke, Associate Professor and Dereje Feyissa, Associate Professor, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia 

Norms and Violence Against Women in Ethiopia: We Were Never Global is available to read as a Hardback and eBook. Learn more

The book is fully available to read online for FREE via Open Access on Elgaronline here.