Pardee School graduate Isabel Silagy (MA IR and Security Studies ’25) co-authored a chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Norms Research in International Relations (Oxford University Press, 2025), published in December 2025. The chapter, titled “Norms, Legitimacy, and Compliance: Between International Law and Politics,” was written with co-author Ezgi Yildiz and appears as Chapter 3 in the volume, which brings together leading scholarship on how norms function in global politics.

Its publication so shortly after Isabel’s graduation is a testament to her hard work and quality of scholarship in and outside of her formal education.

The chapter takes on a fundamental question in international relations theory: what makes states comply with global norms? While IR scholarship has traditionally understood norms as shared standards of appropriate behavior rooted in collective identity and values, Yildiz and Silagy argue that this framing misses something crucial. International law offers a more institutionally grounded perspective; one in which norms derive their authority from formal legal instruments, courts, and treaty bodies that define, interpret, and enforce them. The authors contend that paying closer attention to these legal sources and structures gives scholars and practitioners a far better toolkit for assessing when and why norms hold.

To illustrate the argument, the chapter examines one of the most debated cases in modern norm scholarship: the Bush administration’s challenge to the international prohibition on torture following 9/11. Rather than openly defying the norm, the administration waged a legal campaign to narrow the definition of torture through the infamous “Torture Memos.”

Yildiz and Silagy show that the norm ultimately held not simply because states and civil society pushed back, but because legal authorities, from the U.S. Senate to the European Court of Human Rights, actively defended it. The prohibition’s status as a jus cogens norm, binding on all states regardless of consent, proved especially resilient, raising the threshold for any legitimate challenge.

The chapter concludes with a call for international relations scholars to more systematically engage with international law when studying norms by examining not just where a norm sits in the hierarchy of legal rules, but which institutions are tasked with upholding it.

For Pardee alumni and students working at the intersection of international law, security, and human rights, the chapter offers a model of rigorous, policy-relevant scholarship that connects theoretical debate to real-world consequences.