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.
