Jochem Rietveld

The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) was developed against the backdrop of the heated debate on humanitarian intervention in the 1990s. This decade was characterized by both flagrant inaction in the face of genocide, such as in Rwanda, and by intervention outside the UN legal framework, such as in Kosovo (Schrijver 2013). These dramatic events led former UN Secretary- General Kofi Annan to ask the following question in his 2000 Millennium Report: "If humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica, to gross and systematic violation of human rights that offend every precept of our common humanity” (UN 2000)? Annan’s call proved to be the starting point for a long process that eventually resulted in the development of the principle of the Responsibility to Protect. With R2P, norm entrepreneurs such as the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) aimed to reframe the debate on sovereignty and intervention “by making respect for sovereignty conditional on the responsible exercise of sovereignty by a government” (Schrijver 2013, 318-319). The principle of R2P was eventually adopted at the UN-level at the 2005 World Summit. Here, states subscribed to the notion that “each individual state has the responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity” (UN 2005). Second, the international community should, as appropriate, assist states to exercise this responsibility and, in case national authorities would manifestly fail to protect their populations from mass atrocity crimes, it should be ready to take action to remedy the situation, with all necessary means at its disposal (UN 2005).

This research project aims to explain how the norm of R2P has evolved since 2005 and, more specifically, how and to what extent different regional organizations have internalized and diffused the norm. This involves both looking at the intraregional level how individual regional organizations have processed (and are processing) the norm, which entails different degrees of norm internalisation and implementation, and then, at the interregional level, to what extent they have promoted their understanding of the norm at other regional fora. I subscribe to Welsh’ (2013) notion that questions the idea of progressive development and stability in the meaning of norms. This implies that "contestation should be seen as part and parcel of normative evolution, and that R2P, as an indeterminate and complex norm, is particularly susceptible to these processes” (Welsh 2013, 395). Norm contestation, as well as other norm-related concepts such as localization and circulation are taken into account, as they are expected to have important effects on the processes of norm diffusion and internalization. Theories on actor behavior in global normative debates, such as Bloomfield's (2016) norm antipreneurs, are taken into account as well. The methods of process-tracing and discourse analysis (more specifically, critical frame analysis) will be employed to shed light on the normative trajectories of R2P within and between the regional fora under analysis.