Normative Outlook as an Expression of Individual Agency: Explaining Variation in How States Imagine World Order

ABSTRACT

This article develops an agency‐centered account of “normative outlook” and examines how it is discursively constructed in the UNGA speeches of India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi and China's President Xi Jinping. Drawing on constructivist theory, it conceptualizes normative outlook as a state's articulated vision of world order, discursively assembled through three interpretive repertoires: strategic culture, historical experiences, and political geography. Leaders do not generate normative outlooks ex nihilo; rather, they selectively mobilize these historically available repertoires to interpret and communicate the state's vision of world order in multilateral settings. Using a deductive dictionary and contextualized keyword‐in‐context (KWIC) co‐occurrence analysis, the study maps how core normative terms are anchored in distinct contextual repertoires. The findings show that India's normative outlook is regionally embedded and geographically textured, while China's is programmatic, sloganized, and historically legitimized. The article argues that normative outlooks are not generic value statements, but discursively assembled configurations grounded in historically specific strategic, historical, and spatial imaginaries, thereby advancing debates in constructivist and Global IR scholarship.