Harmful norms often persist despite high costs for individuals and society, and despite the presence of legislation against them. The conventional approach taken by governments and NGOs is to push for the outright abandonment of these norms, yet such an approach is often ineffective. Dowry and early marriage in South Asia, female genital cutting in Africa, and historically footbinding in China and dueling in Europe persisted despite repeated attempts to extirpate the practices. The paper proposes a general model of norm dynamics to examine whether a “mildly harmful” intermediate alternative acts as a stepping stone that facilitates the elimination of a harmful norm in the long run, or becomes a new absorbing norm. The framework is applied to female genital cutting in Somalia, where “Sunna” has almost completely displaced “Pharaonic.”
Authors: Gulesci, Selim; Jindani, Sam; La Ferrara, Eliana; Smerdon, David; Sulaiman, Munshi; and Young, Peyton
Type: Journal Article
Year: 2025
