Adoption, adaptation or chance? Inter-organisational diffusion of the protection of civilians norm from the UN to the African Union
Norms can be adopted without modifications or adapted to regional contexts for strategic or principled reasons. Norm adoption and adaptation can also happen by chance. When adoption takes place without consideration of the norm’s effectiveness or appropriateness, we speak about imitation. When adaptation takes place in such a manner, we lack conceptual tools to analyse it. We propose a novel conce