Abstract Twenty years on from its endorsement at the 2005 World Summit, the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is widely described as being in crisis. Ongoing mass atrocities in Gaza, Ukraine, Myanmar, Sudan, and elsewhere underscore a stark tension between R2P’s entrenchment within the UN system and the apparent permanence of atrocity crimes. Engaging with post- and de-colonial critiques, this piece interrogates whether R2P represents a ‘delusion of saviour’, or a norm with potential for meaningful reform and continued relevance. While acknowledging persistent problems that plague atrocity prevention, including double standards, geopolitical selectivity, and complicity in global harm, it argues that calls to abandon or replace R2P underestimate both its normative resilience and its capacity for reform. Surveying emerging scholarship that seeks to rethink R2P, the piece contends that R2P’s future lies not in utopian overhaul but in critical reconstruction. An R2P in crisis, it concludes, remains preferable to normative retreat.
Abstract International criminal tribunals can be understood as broadly giving effect to the responsibility to protect (R2P). The International Criminal Court (ICC), because of its permanence, is well-situated to implement a specific understanding of R2P. However, the Court is also subject to a variety of internally and externally determined limits on its ability to protect. This article assesses these limits by studying responses to the warrants of arrest issued for crimes committed on 7 October 2023 and in Gaza afterwards. It explains the new ways in which the type of protection offered by international courts can be affected, and also outlines the legal, discursive and symbolic significance of the Gaza warrants even in the face of objections from many Western states. Importantly, it highlights the nature of the Court as a judicial body that issues deliberative reasons, and to whom legal obligations are owed by states. This allows the Court to effectively compel states to explain their inaction in relation to ICC decisions, which in turn helps insulate the Court from unwarranted criticism, reinforce the continued salience of R2P as a general norm of international law, and support the possibility of the Court as a vector for protection.
Abstract The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) has neither consolidated into a coherent regime of collective protection nor faded in the face of geopolitical contestation. Instead, its trajectory within the United Nations reveals a subtler form of normative evolution shaped by ongoing deliberation, procedural negotiation, and institutional practice. Drawing on the Norm Circulation Framework, this article identifies a neglected dynamic in this process: reflexive institutional transformation, whereby engagement with a contested norm gradually reshapes the bureaucratic, interpretive, and procedural habits of the institution itself. Through analysis of debates in the UN General Assembly and mandate practices in the UN Security Council, the article shows how R2P has been discursively embedded and procedurally internalised, even as its enforcement dimension remains politically constrained. R2P persists less as a directive for intervention than as a normative vocabulary through which responsibility is articulated, contested, and assigned within contemporary global politics.
Abstract Responsibility to Protect (R2P) was unanimously endorsed at the 2005 World Summit and enshrined in Paragraphs 138 and 139 of the United Nations General Assembly Outcome Document. It is deemed the international community’s most ambitious normative framework for preventing and responding to genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing. Yet two decades after its adoption, R2P stands profoundly delegitimised. This article argues that hegemonic powers, defined as the United States, China, and Russia, do not merely enable or constrain R2P invocation, they actively instrumentalise, selectively apply, and discursively contest the norm to serve their strategic interests, resulting in a deeply politicised doctrine whose legitimacy has collapsed. Through a structured, focused comparison of four critical cases – Libya (2011), Syria (2011–2025), Ukraine (2022–2025), and Gaza (2023–2025) – this article explicates how hegemonic veto power, material capabilities, discursive authority, and regional proxy networks fundamentally shape R2P’s trajectory. The analysis sheds light on the fact that R2P, rather than evolving into a genuine universal norm, has become a legitimising tool for the powerful to pursue geopolitical interests under a humanitarian guise while simultaneously blocking its application when inconvenient. The emergence of counter-norms such as Brazil’s ‘Responsibility while Protecting’, China’s ‘responsible protection’, Russia’s ‘sovereignty as responsibility’, alongside global South contestation and the structural challenge of multipolarity, signals the norm’s irreversible erosion. The article concludes that, without fundamental reform of the P5 veto power or a reconceptualisation of sovereignty that moves beyond liberal hegemonic assumptions, R2P remains a ‘narrow but deep’ principle applicable only when great powers’ interests align, undermining international humanitarian protection.
Abstract For all the difficulties in ensuring its effective implementation in recent years, R2P remains the only credible conceptual foundation – morally and politically – for achieving global consensus about how to respond to mass atrocity crimes committed behind sovereign state walls. But its birth was anything but inevitable, capable of being aborted at any of the three pivotal stages here described. First, finding common ground between global North and South, where none had previously existed around the concept of humanitarian intervention, which was achieved by the report of the Canadian-sponsored International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty in 2001. Second, ensuring that the Commission’s recommendations could not be ignored by crucial decision-makers, achieved by the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change in 2004. And third becoming, as a result of intensive diplomatic effort, one of the small handful of substantive resolutions to be endorsed by the UN 60th Anniversary World Summit, and subsequent General Assembly in 2005.
Abstract This article examines the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) fulfilment of commitments to prevent and protect populations from sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) under the ASEAN Regional Plan of Action on Women, Peace and Security (RPA-WPS). Using qualitative content analysis of 30 publicly available documents, including ASEAN Chair’s Statements from the 40th to 46th Summits (2021–2025), as well as relevant ASEAN, UN General Assembly, UN Security Council, and Human Rights Council materials, the study assesses the extent to which ASEAN has invoked its RPA-WPS commitments to address escalating SGBV in Myanmar following the 2021 coup. Despite institutional progress marked by the adoption of the RPA-WPS, ASEAN’s discourse on Myanmar remains largely detached from its SGBV protection and prevention commitments. The findings underscore that while ASEAN now possesses the framework and indicators to act on SGBV, meaningful implementation continues to be constrained by political caution.
The 3 January 2026 US military intervention in Venezuela abruptly foreclosed what had emerged as a credible opportunity for the multilateral application of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). In the months preceding the intervention, documented repression, exhausted diplomacy, and partial regional alignment created conditions broadly consistent with the doctrine’s original intent. The intervention displaced this trajectory by reframing the crisis in unilateral security terms, bypassing multilateral authorisation and coordination. This intervention argues that the Venezuelan case exposes a central vulnerability of R2P: its effectiveness depends not only on normative legitimacy but on hegemonic restraint. When dominant powers act unilaterally, R2P remains formally uncontested yet becomes operationally unavailable. The case thus illustrates how unilateral intervention can undermine multilateral protection regimes without rejecting their underlying norms.
This article examines the persistent tension between liberalism's anti-hierarchical ethos and the need for effective responsibility allocation to perpetuate the liberal international order (LIO). While the LIO aspires to reproduce itself through codified rules and norms, these mechanisms often fail under conditions of aporia - moments of radical uncertainty where procedural compliance cannot guarantee ethically responsible action. Drawing on Derrida's 'aporia of responsibility', the article argues that the order's guarantors increasingly rely on responsibilisation - a governance technique that induces states to internalise responsibility for the order in exchange for status recognition. Through theoretical analysis and empirical illustrations of US foreign policy, the study demonstrates how responsibilisation operates as a substitute for coercion and hierarchy, enabling the liberal core to 'govern at a distance' while preserving the order's liberal logic. However, the politicisation of 'responsible behaviour' and competing interpretations among major powers perpetuate uncertainty, suggesting that aporias will remain a structural feature of the LIO.
This article examines whether the July 2024 crackdown on student-led protests in Bangladesh appears to meet the legal elements of crimes against humanity under Article 7 of the Rome Statute. Using a doctrinal methodology, it interprets treaty provisions, the ICC Elements of Crimes, and relevant jurisprudence, applying them to patterns of conduct documented by triangulated public sources, including UN findings, domestic NGO reports, medical data, and open-source verification. The analysis addresses killings, arbitrary detention, torture, sexual and gender-based violence, persecution, enforced disappearance, and other inhumane acts, situating them within the contextual elements of ‘widespread or systematic attack’ and ‘State or organizational policy.’ It also considers ongoing proceedings before the International Crimes Tribunal of Bangladesh, the 2024 statutory amendments, and procedural factors relevant to complementarity under Article 17. The article argues that the available evidence, if substantiated, indicates that several elements of crimes against humanity are plausibly met, particularly the requirements of a widespread or systematic attack and multiple underlying acts listed in Article 7. The aim is to clarify applicable legal standards and procedural challenges without pronouncing on individual criminal responsibility.
The EU-Turkey Statement of 18 March 2016 was introduced in response to increased migration from Turkey to the EU via Greece and the Western Balkans. This article critically examines the Statement's compatibility with binding EU and international human rights standards, particularly focusing on the principles of non-refoulement and the prohibition of collective expulsion. It argues that the arrangement enables the return of asylum-seekers to T & uuml;rkiye without adequate procedural safeguards, notably individual assessments of asylum claims. Additionally, the analysis questions T & uuml;rkiye's designation as a safe third country, highlighting risks of asylum-seekers being returned to conditions inconsistent with protections under the 1951 Refugee Convention and the European Convention on Human Rights. Drawing on jurisprudence from the European Court of Human Rights, the Court of Justice of the EU, and recent developments under the EU's New Pact on Migration and Asylum, the article challenges the Statement's legal validity and its human rights implications.
This article critically examines the media's complex role in both facilitating and obstructing the prevention of mass atrocities, identifying three key pathways of influence: structural prevention, operational prevention, and crisis response. It addresses a gap in existing research, which has primarily explored media influence on humanitarian aid and political support for interventions, while paying less attention to its specific role in atrocity prevention. By integrating insights from mass atrocity research with scholarship on news media and journalism, and drawing on expert interviews and a practitioner workshop, this article deepens understanding of the interdependencies between media, political actors, and society in high-risk contexts. It also suggests new research avenues to explore these dynamics further and offers some recommendations for journalists, media organisations, and funders.
