| Summary/Abstract |
How do we know when a state has been socialized to an international norm? Through a case study of Sierra Leone's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, this article shows that not even voluntary compliance combined with material costs constitutes sufficient evidence of socialization. Highly vulnerable states, equally beholden to international donors and fractious domestic patronage networks, face restricted choice sets. They confront both compliance and overt noncompliance as equal existential threats, and their most important foreign policy goal becomes invisibility; that is, they must avoid attracting international attention. These states behave outwardly like they have accepted the norm's legitimacy, but their actions are rooted in a fundamentally different meaning that blocks socialization and has implications for the state system as a whole.
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