Normalization in World Politics

Front matter

Normalization in

World Politics

Gëzim Visoka and Nicolas Lemay-Hébert

Contents

PREFACE ix Introduction I Mapping Normalization in World Politics 21 Imposing Normalcy 55 Restoring Normalcy 89 Accepting Normalcy 119 Toward a Society of Docile States IsI REFERENCES 169 INDEX 197

Digital materials related to this title can be found on the Fulcrum platform via the following citable URL: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.10171116

Preface

We started thinking about the concepts of normalcy and normalization in 2016, in what seems like a lifetime ago. Since our first work on the subject (Lemay-Hébert and Visoka 2017), we have spent countless hours tracing various semantic uses of normalization in world politics. The product of all those hours is encapsulated in this book. Its writing has been a long journey, marked by the birth of children, the passing away of loved ones, and countless international and national crises that have made the book all the more challenging to complete and, we hope, all the more relevant to deciphering the new world we are entering.

As we face new challenges from climate change and the rise of populism in Western politics and beyond, there is little doubt that we are entering a new configuration of world politics. Driven by nostalgia for past certainties or fear of what is coming next, references to normalcy have been creeping into political discourse, with people either vying for a return to past normalcy or coping with the new normal. The normal and the quest of normalcy are emerging as central features of how we make sense of the world. After being questioned multiple times by people “hearing it on TV,” one political commentator asked recently if normalcy “is even a word” (McNally 2019). While there are widely accepted definitions of the normal and normalcy, associated with the “standard” and the “regular, usual, or typical” (Oxford English Dictionary), what is normal can be highly contested. The concept ingrains descriptive and prescriptive features of reality. It signifies order but constantly aims to regularize and discipline life along particular norms. Most important, it tends to include and exclude, to homogenize and heterogenize, ways of being, seeing, and acting in the world.

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‘These features of normalcy are omnipresent in the world now like never before. With the focus on climate security, it certainly feels as if we are living in a new, abnormal world—normalizing a state of affairs that was considered highly abnormal just a few years ago. In that regard, it is telling that normalization has become a new political battleground between agents of change on both sides of the climate equation, trying to (re)conquer this new world molded by changing standards of normalcy. As we wrote this book, one of us was living in the Australian capital, Canberra, which was covered in thick clouds of smoke for months due to a “historical” bushfire crisis. For Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, the implications of that crisis as of January 2020 meant that “we have to prepare for the new normal,” an understanding immediately challenged by the leader of the Labor opposition, Anthony Albanese, who tweeted, “We can’t just sit by and accept this as the new normal.” On another front, the effort to control the evolution of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) led to new governmental strategies, with one-third of the world’s population under some form of lockdown at the start of the pandemic. In turn, critical theorists such as Giorgio Agamben lament the growing tendency to use the state of exception as a normal paradigm of government. At the same time, states impacted by the epidemic have tried to reassure others (and themselves) that there will be a “return to normalcy.” What is normal and what is accepted as such are increasingly at the center of politics, creating new fault lines and disrupting old ways of doing politics. Some believe the pandemic has given us a once-in-a-generation chance to remake societies and build a better future, with a more just and sustainable normalcy. Others fear that it may simply lead to an increase in existing injustices, returning to an old familiar normal state. Around the same time, the Black Lives Matter movement picked up steam after the killing of George Floyd in May 2020, with growing calls to “normalize equality.”

A further example of the political battleground of normalcy is the rise of populism in politics, pushing people to question how political discourse has disrupted past normal settings. Donald Trump’s rise to US presidential power is itself a testimony of a new battleground of normalcy, paradoxically presenting a contestation of a specific normal state of affairs—normalizing what was previously highly abnormal—while promoting the return to a “normal,” romanticized past. In a very public way, Trump threw out of the window all pretense of normalcy in everyday politics (especially acting “presidential”), while simultaneously making a central claim, throughout his campaign and term in office, to return to a previous normal, a nostalgic and romanticized past of unfettered American domination (“making America great again,”

Preface + xi or making normalcy normal again). Populist parties have gained votes and seats in many countries and entered government coalitions in eleven Western democracies, including in Austria, Italy, and Switzerland, disrupting “normal politics.” Examples also abound outside the West. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro redefined normalcy in Brazil, otherizing segments of the Brazilian population with statements such as “leftists do not deserve to be treated like normal people,” while vying to reconnect with tactics of the past military dictatorship. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte posed a drastic challenge to what is considered normal in Filipino politics, promoting his own brand of illiberalism and using swear words never printed previously, leading to emulation by government officials and a reconfiguration of everyday life. What is normal is being redefined constantly, often by drawing on discourses about old normalcy, increasingly redefining the political landscape around us, and thus imposing new meanings of normalcy.

This book aims to trace various discourses and practices associated with normalcy in world politics. Mostly, we here focus on how dominant states and international organizations try to manage global affairs through imposing normalcy over fragile states, restoring normalcy over disaster-affected states, and accepting normalcy over suppressive states. We try to show how discourses and practices come together in constituting normalization interventions and play a role in shaping the dynamics of continuity and change in world politics. That the challenges of climate change and the rise of populism are not tackled explicitly in this book should not be taken as a statement about what we consider central or more important in world politics. The book’s focus simply highlights the specific topics, most notably the thematic of international interventions, that are our areas of mutual and relative expertise. More work remains to be done to highlight other forms of normalization in world politics, and do hope that this book will open up new research avenues for students and scholars interested in normalization discourses and practices.

Many colleagues read part of the manuscript and gave us frank advice. We thank Pol Bargués-Pedreny, David Chandler, Jonathan Fisher, Luke Glanville, Elisa Lopez Lucia, Elisa Randazzo, and Katrin Travouillon for their comments on early drafts. We benefited from feedback provided by colleagues when we presented draft chapters at the Ninth Pan-European Conference of the European International Studies Association in Sicily (2015), at the International Studies Association’s Fifty-Eighth Annual Convention in Baltimore (2017), at the conference “The Practices, Politics, and Paradigms of IO Peacebuilding” organized by the Austrian Study Centre xii + Preface for Peace and Conflict Resolution (2017), at a research seminar organized by the School of Law and Government at Dublin City University, and at a manuscript workshop held in the Department of International Relations at the Australian National University (2019). We are specifically grateful to Mary-Louise Hickey for providing thorough feedback on the manuscript and facilitating the copyediting process. We thank the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Dublin City University for partially supporting the completion of this book. Finally, we are grateful to Elizabeth Demers and Haley Winkle at the University of Michigan Press for their generosity and support throughout this project and to the two anonymous reviewers who provided constructive and encouraging feedback.

Gézim Visoka, Dublin Nicolas Lemay-Hébert, Canberra December 2020

In December 2012, the United Nations (UN) concluded its peacekeeping operations in Timor-Leste, declaring that the country had reached normalcy, self-sufficiency, and resilience. Since 1999, the UN had administered and monitored the country in its transition to independent statehood and had played a major role in building the state from scratch. The rationale for international intervention in Timor-Leste, as well as its progress toward recognized statehood and self-sufficiency, was based on the capacity of that fledgling state to demonstrate “democratic normality,” to achieve “institutional normalization,” and to be able to “return to normalcy” after political turmoil (UN Security Council 2009a, 2009b, 2012). International actors have used multiple discursive frameworks for justifying interventions in world politics, from maintaining international peace and stability to enhancing resilience and promoting human rights and the protection of civilians. Among those frameworks, the discourse of normalcy and normalization has been mobilized to justify interventions in societies affected by conflict or disaster. For instance, in Kosovo, the mandate of the UN mission was to build a normal society; in Afghanistan, normalcy has been used interchangeably as a measure of peace, stability, and post-conflict reconstruction; and in Georgia, normalization is understood by the European Union to be an instrument of conflict management and stabilization. In disaster-affected countries, the quest for restoring normalcy underlies the rationales for emergency relief and post-disaster recovery. Gradually, calls for adjusting to the normalcy and accepting the permanence of crises are gaining prominence in political and academic discourse about a range of concerns, from terrorist attacks and protracted violent conflicts to natural disasters caused by climate change, the rise of populism, and global pandemic outbreaks. How can we make sense of those invocations of normalcy? How and to what effect do different actors mobilize the vocabulary of normalcy? Has normalization become another global rationale for framing and governing multiple forms of international interventions?

The concepts of normalcy and normalization have been defined variously in different disciplines, making the notions essentially contested and contingent on semantic interpretations. The normal is associated with the ordinary, average, and acceptable state of affairs, whereas normalcy is associated with order, stability, and acceptability. In turn, normalization signifies the process and range of techniques, tools, and mechanisms employed for imposing, restoring, or sustaining normalcy. Normalization operates through a dual mode of intervention: constructing the abnormal through a preconceived notion of what ought to be normal and imposing new meanings and practices of normalcy through prescribing what should be normal. The notions of normalcy and normalization have been present for some time in world politics, but there has been little explicit effort to conceptualize and unpack their meaning(s) in practice. Mostly, those notions have been used interchangeably with the concepts of peace, stability, safety, and order, as well as recovery and reconstruction of relations and affairs between and within states affected by war, disaster, and other events deemed unusual and unacceptable. In other words, normalcy is associated with a good and desired state of affairs, something to be aspired to in general. Normalization has been studied widely in broader social science disciplines, which provide fertile grounds on which we construct our analytical framework of normalization in world politics. However, what is normal is contingent on relational perspectives; therefore, there is no single truth about normalcy. The permanent struggles for normalization result in shifting the meaning of what is normal in the social and political realm. At best, exploring normalization practices sheds light on competing rationales and technologies for constantly producing new ways of seeing and acting in the world.

‘The purpose of this book is to make sense of contemporary normalization discourses and practices in world politics. The meaning of normalcy is context-specific and contingent on the discursive frameworks that precede and follow interventions in targeted societies. Therefore, we do not privilege a particular understanding of what is normal and what should constitute normalcy. Instead, we identify tensions and contradictions inherent in the various normalization discourses and practices prevalent in world politics. We are well aware that there is no singular understanding of what constitutes normalcy. We try to problematize the technologies of power implicated in imposing, restoring, or accepting normalcy in societies labeled as abnormal. Doing so reveals that the practices of normalization are intertwined deeply with the discursive knowledge in which they are situated. The motive for normalizing turbulent societies may be rooted in geopolitical or ideological interests, may be a response to external events and processes that trigger the necessity for intervention to impose or restore normalcy in abnormal societies, or may even coexist with different understandings of normalcy. Thus, the purpose and technology of normalization correspond to how abnormality is framed. That correspondence is at the heart of the paradox of a selective understanding of normalcy. The abnormalization is constructed and sustained through knowledge production in the form of reports, metrics, and statistical analysis, which categorizes state performance across different scales. In short, the very act of normalization makes certain practices abnormal, which serves as the locomotive for justifying intervention and maintaining unequal power relations.

‘This study offers a reflective overview of various registers of normalizing interventions in the contemporary world, problematizing the constitutive politics of international hierarchical order that privileges certain states and marginalizes and locks others into a complex regime of docility. By bringing together three clusters of discourses and practices of normalization— imposing, restoring, and accepting normalcy—we highlight interventionary dynamics mostly obscured, until now, by other international relations paradigms. Whereas the discourse and practices of normalization have largely been subsumed into other frameworks or paradigms and not given specific treatment in existing scholarship, we aim to reveal the normalization logics that are structuring world politics. Furthermore, this work contributes in a new and innovative way to the existing scholarship by bringing together interventionary dynamics that tend to be treated separately in the literature. An undue focus on singular forms of interventions—liberal interventionism, resilience building, or even noninterventionism—overlooks the delicate balancing act in which powerful actors find themselves. We posit that the mobilization of specific semantic categories by powerful actors responds to a logic of optimization of interventions, following a “science of the possible,” so to speak.

PROBLEMATIZING NORMALIZATION IN WORLD POLITICS

‘The question of normalization is central to understanding the ever-shifting rationales and techniques of intervention in world politics. Existing accounts tend to approach normalcy as a desirable state of affairs linked to the concepts of peace, order, stability, and progress, regarding normalization as a gradual process of returning to an optimal condition of normalcy. When the international order is stable and operating according to a fixed set of principles and rules agreed by most, the configuration of world politics is understood as being “normal” or at least operating in a normal way. Any deviation to that perceived norm triggers reactions that involve labeling other states and actors as abnormal. That labeling further legitimizes various disciplinary and punitive measures, ranging from derogatory labeling to various forms of stigmatization, subjugation, examination, and subordination. Perceived deviation from a specific order of normalcy at the international level is handled through a wide range of measures, involving various actors, as well as the mobilization of different interventionary mechanisms and tools. Until now, the loose international architecture of normalization has been studied through the separate lenses of preventive diplomacy, sanctions, peacekeeping, conflict management, military and civilian interventions, peacebuilding, disaster relief, humanitarian assistance, and mechanisms of human rights protection. Looking at normalization efforts through those lenses fails to capture adequately the politics and analytics behind normalization in world politics. In particular, it remains puzzling how normalcy as a typical state of affairs is constructed in practice and then applied unevenly across different states and societies deemed abnormal. Moreover, we have limited understanding of the normalization technologies employed to impose, restore, or accept meanings of normalcy.

In our work, we seek to offer a rich account of normalization in world politics, not by putting forward a single and unified account of the normal, but through an analysis of the multiple meanings, complex attributes, and various features of normalization across different scholarly and policy debates. What constitutes normalcy is highly political and contested, subject to a multitude of discourses, practices, institutions, and relations propagated by state and non-state actors. We posit that discursive knowledge and practices of normalization go hand in hand, jointly constituting a social reality and the grounds for determining the techniques and the scope of interventions. Prior to examining the discourse—practice nexus of normalization intervention, it is important to highlight what we think foregrounds contemporary interventions. We posit that interventions are linked to a will to normalize other states, which is based on the assumption that for an international rules-based society to emerge and operate under certain common norms, regulations, and institutions, states have a responsibility to engage in normalizing other states—and sometimes themselves—and to ensure that perceived anomalies, deviancies, and misconduct are handled through various technologies of power and disciplinary mechanisms. Behind normalization interventions lies an assemblage of states, institutions, structures, and alliances governed by a set of evolving socio-legal, political-diplomatic, and military norms, standards, and practices that justify interventions not so much to protect the abnormal states but to maintain the normal and stable parts of the world. Notably, the quest for normalization among the intervening states originates from their ontological insecurity about anticipating, mitigating, and managing perceived risks to their norms and way of life as well as entrenched geopolitical, economic, and institutional privileges abroad. That origin raises an important question: are normalization interventions foregrounded on a region-specific meaning of what a normal state should look like, and if so, how possible and ethically viable is it to impose such an order of normalcy on other regions and parts of the world? ‘This question is central to our analysis, as, in the present time, the dominant figure of normal state and infrastructure of political, normative, and social features of normalcy is the Western model of statehood associated with peace, stability, democracy, liberalism, human rights, and the market economy. Other states that do not fit that civilizational, ideological, and organizational model of political communities often risk being labeled as deviant, fragile, failed states and thus become subject to various normalization interventions.

The practices of normalization are embedded in the predicaments of transformative change, entailing the reorganization of systems of political authority and institutions, norm constitution, and social identities (see Adler 2019). At the same time, the purposes and technologies of normalization correspond to how abnormality is framed. Therefore, it is crucial to examine how the abnormalization of states is constructed and sustained through knowledge production in the form of reports, metrics, and statistical analysis, which categorizes state performance across different scales. As Nicholas Onuf (1989: 23) posits, “categories derive from a consideration of language as enabling people to perform social acts and achieve ends by making statements of assertion, direction, and commitment.” Semantic categories are tied, in turn, to what Michael Barnett (2010: 11) calls “productive power,” showing “how underlying discourses produce social kinds, make possible, imaginable, and desirable certain kinds of actions, and distribute unevenly social capacities to actors that are situated in distinct social positions.” That uneven distribution is tied to international hierarchies, with more powerful actors contributing to shape “what is ‘normal, ‘natural, ‘abnormal’ or

‘unthinkable’” (Suzuki 2017: 221). However, this process is not linked to one single, unified understanding of (ab)normalcy and (ab)normalization. Exploring the plurality of normalization practices opens up possibilities to research the different ways of seeing and acting in world politics, with a different graduation of normalization strategies as disciplinary techniques designed to respond to very specific sets of issues at hand for powerful actors. As the following analysis shows, the discursive knowledge of targeted states has a direct role in legitimizing particular forms of normalization. The intersection of both “worlds’—the policy and academic spheres—enables the constitution of the meanings of normalcy and normalization practices identified in this study. Thus, analyzing normalization in world politics as a spectrum of discourses and practices sheds light on the complex governmentality arrangement where dominant states mobilize different bodies of knowledge to portray specific situations or polities as abnormal and to enable different forms of interventions.

At the domestic level, normalization intends to create subjects with rights and obligations to obey the normal legal, political, social, cultural, and economic order. In the international context, the motives of normalization cannot be easily decoded. One way of making sense of the rationales for normalization is to trace their wider effects. The dynamics of state normalization undergo a process of intentional disempowerment by external actors to ensure their transformation and re-empowerment along new modes of state behavior, adopted norms, institutional structures, and codes of domestic and international conduct. Does the process of normalization in itself lay the foundations of protracted fragility and inability for progress, autonomy, and emancipation in states labeled as abnormal? The very process of normalizing others—which often requires an initial abnormalization of others—results in preserving and reproducing the intervener’s normalcy, branding it as a universally exported mode of life, which, in turn, enhances the hierarchical status and improves its international moral, political, and military standing. Consequently, societies that undergo normalization interventions are entrapped into systems of prolonged external examination and imposition that take different institutional and knowledge configurations. Normalization through external interventions becomes ingrained in social and political institutions, whereby recipient societies should constantly be disciplined, constrained, and transformed from outside as well as through internalized cultures of self-normalization, self-transformation, and self-restraint. States subject to external normalization interventions thus develop a different form of knowledge about themselves as being less worthy than others, less autonomous and sovereign, or less equal.

Accordingly, problematizing normalization discourses and practices in world politics requires gathering multiple analytical tools as well as drawing on and challenging a broad range of scholarly knowledge. So far, scholarly debates in International Relations (IR) have discussed normalization almost in passing, with no systemic treatment of the theme (see Barston 2013; Wille 2013). We have rich accounts of different and case-specific interventions, but there is a lack of broader understanding of global dynamics of normalization interventions. In this book, we fill the gap by drawing on Michel Foucault’s (2003) analytics of normalization (summarized in his lectures on the abnormal) to study contemporary interventions in world politics. While Foucault’s work on normalization has been applied mostly to studies of disciplinary power at the domestic level (such as criminal justice, education, health care, and social life), it has insufficiently applied to international relations. Moreover, Foucaults work on governmentality, security, and biopolitics has had a profound influence on the scholarly debates in various IR fields, such as international organizations (Joseph 2012), human security and resilience (Duffield 2001; Jabri 2006; Joseph 2013), critical security studies (Dillon and Neal 2008; Peoples and Vaughan-Williams 2010; Aradau et al. 2014), and critical peace and conflict studies (Richmond 2010; Chandler and Richmond 2015). Foucault’s critical analytics has contributed enormously to contemporary studies attempting to disentangle and problematize power, governance, institutions, agency, and resistance (Kiersey and Stokes 2011). That contribution notwithstanding, Foucaults work has been criticized for embedding elements of Eurocentrism and racism and for a disregard of the non-Western world (see Howell and Richter-Montpetit 2019; Lewis 2017; Visoka 2019). However, his work on normalization has had only a limited exposition in IR, with the exception of a number of limited studies that have applied it as an analytical framework for specific case studies (see Zanotti 2006, 2011).

Foucault’s work on the technologies of governmentality provides valuable insights for conceptualizing different technologies of normalization in turbulent societies affected by and prone to conflicts and disasters. His conception of the technologies of sign systems and power captures how we use “signs, meanings, symbols, or significations” to justify particular types of normalization interventions, as well as to understand the conduct and submission of individuals “to certain ends or domination” (Foucault 1988b: 18). The knowledge production and practices of normalization operate on an optimization logic, whereby “the field is left open to fluctuating processes” (Foucault 2008: 259-60), which permits the selectivity of what states consider normal and abnormal in other societies. For Foucault, the concept of normalization represents the most “advanced” form of intervention in society by imposing precise norms without having to resort to punishment. As such, we agree with Onuf (2017: 26) that Foucault’s “greatest contribution to social theory” is “his treatment of normality,” especially his analysis of how disciplinary mechanisms relate to bodies of knowledge that produce standards of intelligibility.

Tracing normalization interventions necessitates identifying the disciplinary techniques and the modes of (ab)normalization through knowledge production and direct intervention in the internal affairs of targeted states. Foucault suggests three disciplinary technologies of power that result in a normalizing order. The first technology is hierarchical observations, where the examiner surveys and tracks the conduct of the subject in relation to the norm. The second disciplinary technique entails normalizing judgment, a process that seeks to use various putative and corrective measures to ensure conformity with the norm. The third technology is examination, which entails a ritualized process of visible observation of social practices, relations, and hierarchies and requires making judgments and differentiations between them. Those three technologies of power contribute to “sediment” norms to the point where they are uncritically accepted and thus become normalized. Beyond the “traditional” Foucauldian perspective, our work also contributes to the study of world politics by providing an innovative theorization of the social practices of normalization in world politics. We seek to offer a rich account of normalization in world politics, by not looking for or prioritizing a single and unified history and account of what is deemed “normal” but, rather, searching for the multiple meanings, complex attributes, and various features of normalization across different scholarly debates.

THE ARGUMENT

In this book, we explore how discourses and practices of normalization have emerged as an overarching rationale for optimizing international interventions. The optimization of interventions entails selective, uneven, and discordant responses to governing risk through different normalization analytics and technologies. Normalization has become a fluid rationale, a regime of truth, as well as a disciplinary technology to govern other states and societies through calculable and optimized techniques that maximize effects, minimize resistance, and enhance the hierarchical power of states without them bearing special responsibilities for the outcomes. Thus, we approach nor-

Table 1. An Outlook of Normalization Interventions in World Politics

State label Category Technology

Fragile states Imposing normalcy Liberal interventionism

Disaster-affected states Restoring normalcy Resilience and disaster management

Suppressive states Accepting normalcy Confessionary practices malization in world politics as discursive practices and social interventions whose meaning and application is determined through different analytics and technologies of power. We argue that normalization interventions lie at the intersection between the technologies of domination of others and those of the self and that the interplay between the two enables different actors to create the subjects of interventions as well as to legitimize specific forms of international interventions. We organize our argument around three key conceptual components: (1) state labeling, (2) categories of normalization, and (3) technologies of normalization (see table 1).

‘The first component focuses on state labeling as the discursive basis for justifying different forms of normalization interventions. We argue that to understand the technologies of normalization, we must focus on the discourses that define the normal, exceptional, and abnormal and must trace different discursive regimes that make such “truth games” possible. The discursive regimes expressed in the form of metaphor that we use in this book derive from the figures of the “abnormal individuals” as analyzed in Foucault’s (2003) lectures on the “Abnormal.” The three figures of the abnormal—the monster, the incorrigible, and the onanist—are constructed through a distinct discursive framework and handled through distinct social, political, judicial, medical, and technocratic mechanisms constituting a continuum of normalization technologies. We mirror those figures of the abnormal with similar state labels in world politics. Failed states are linked to the figure of the “monster,” defying the laws of nature and society. Disaster-prone states are linked to the figure of the “incorrigible,” which is regular in its irregularities, but which the social institutions know how to discipline. Finally, we find parallels between suppressive states that are nevertheless part of the broad “international community” and the “onanist,” which appears to be a universal individual that breaches social norms but, at the same time, is still accepted by all. Through these labels, we are able to explore how toponymies of statehood construct a discursive basis for advancing the normalization process. In particular, we analyze how labeling of other states as failed, disaster-prone, or suppressive permits the dominant states (mostly concentrated in the Western world) the right to intervene, tolerate, assist, and punish others. Though existing discourses of normalization in world politics differ from colonial incursions, occupations, and exploitations, they are still embedded in cultural imperialism when determining the original point and positionality of normalcy against which other targeted societies are examined. Resemblances of cultural imperialism are evident especially when non-Western historical conditions and understandings of normalcy are not regarded as sufficient for advancing justice, order, and peace in world politics.

Our argument’s second conceptual component focuses on three categories of normalization—imposing, restoring, and accepting normalcy— which correspond to the three state figures labeled and outlined above. We argue that the contemporary technologies of normalization involve imposing normalcy over failed or fragile states to tame their illiberal monstrosity, restoring normalcy over disaster-prone states to manage their incorrigibility, and, finally, accepting the normalcy of suppressive states to strategically forge self-normalization, recognize alterity, and cope with difference. Contemporary normalization interventions are characterized by the deployment of optimal disciplinary technologies for reconfiguring other states along three trajectories: mirroring the self through imposing normalcy, balancing the self and the other through restoring normalcy, and maintaining difference through accepting normalcy. In the following chapters, we link each normalization category with its own technology of intervention and with specific transformative aims. Societies that are labeled as monstrous and unable to self-normalize are subject to external intervention. Imposing a new normalcy over failed states aims to socially transform them into well-behaved actors in world politics through peacebuilding, statebuilding, and social reconstruction. Restoring normalcy aims to improve resilience capabilities of disaster-prone states while bringing back normalcy or “bouncing forward” to a more sustainable normal through assistance in disaster management. Finally, accepting normalcy of suppressive states operates through confessional narratives and the politics of alliance, accepting irregularities as constitutive of the world order.