Malala Yousafzai Advocating the Right to Education as a Norm Entrepreneur in International Relations

Malala Yousafzai is a teenage woman who is known for her advocacy for the right to education for girls. After the attack of the Taliban on October 9th 2012 she has evolved from a ‘normal’ girl to a norm entrepreneur advocating the right to education for girls on an international level. According to Finnemore and Sikkink, norm entrepreneurs play a critical role in the first stage of norm emergence in the norm life cycle (1998, 895). Constructivism lacks a theory of agency. The role of individuals as norm entrepreneurs has been neglected in previous research in particular. Therefore, the focus of this thesis is on how individuals as norm entrepreneurs attempt to persuade states to conform to a norm. Norm entrepreneurs challenge discourse through persuasion. According to Keck and Sikkink there are four advocacy tactics norm entrepreneurs use to spread their norm(s). These are: information politics, symbolic politics, leverage politics and accountability politics (1999, 95). This thesis...Show moreMalala Yousafzai is a teenage woman who is known for her advocacy for the right to education for girls. After the attack of the Taliban on October 9th 2012 she has evolved from a ‘normal’ girl to a norm entrepreneur advocating the right to education for girls on an international level. According to Finnemore and Sikkink, norm entrepreneurs play a critical role in the first stage of norm emergence in the norm life cycle (1998, 895). Constructivism lacks a theory of agency. The role of individuals as norm entrepreneurs has been neglected in previous research in particular. Therefore, the focus of this thesis is on how individuals as norm entrepreneurs attempt to persuade states to conform to a norm. Norm entrepreneurs challenge discourse through persuasion. According to Keck and Sikkink there are four advocacy tactics norm entrepreneurs use to spread their norm(s). These are: information politics, symbolic politics, leverage politics and accountability politics (1999, 95). This thesis presents a sinlge case study of Malala as a norm entrepreneur diffusing the right to education for girls. Keck and Sikkink’s typology of advocacy tactics is used to determine which advocacy tactic Malala uses in her advocacy. Content analysis of four of her speeches of 2013 is done through a combination of qualitative and quantative research. The results of the analysis of the four speeches show that Malala mainly uses symbolic politics as the dominant advocacy tactic to diffuse the right to education for girls, which is often combined with information politics as the subdominant advocacy tactic. Moral leverage is also often used to motivate others to join her advocacy.Show less

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Malala Yousafzai Advocating the Right to Education as a Norm Entrepreneur in International Relations