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Paper short abstract

Shifting from state-level dynamics to the local level, this paper examines how activists translate grievances into historical justice norms. Analyzing "comfort women" redress across Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, it shows how domestic state structures force divergent strategies, driving norm displacement and fragmentation rather than congruence.

Paper long abstract

While traditional International Relations (IR) scholarship largely prioritizes state-level interactions, this paper shifts focus to the local level to investigate how grassroots actors translate historical grievances into the emerging norm of historical justice. Examining the "comfort women" redress movement across Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, it argues that global norms are actively reshaped and contested by local activists navigating multi-layered political friction, rather than being smoothly adopted.

Drawing on fieldwork and qualitative interviews with the Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace in Tokyo, the War and Women’s Human Rights Museum in Seoul, and the Ama Museum in Taipei, the study shows how divergent state architectures force activists into conflicting strategies: South Korean advocates leverage universal human rights to transcend bilateral disputes, Japanese activists link wartime memory to domestic and international feminist struggles to counter state revisionism, and Taiwanese advocates balance survivor recognition with strategic alignment toward Japan.

By centering local-level analysis, this paper contributes to constructivist IR and memory studies by challenging top-down assumptions of normative convergence. Ultimately, it demonstrates that when local actors take up emerging norms, the resulting friction holds the potential to displace the norm's core meaning while fracturing regional coalitions, generating sustained divergence that may compel the movement to seek new sites of localization.