Decoloniality, dewesternisation, and the Responsibility to Protect

Abstract The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) has been shaped by advocacy from states in the Global South. How should the impacts of this advocacy be understood? This paper argues that whilst Global South and rising-power engagement has shaped R2P, it has not unpicked elements of coloniality that remain embedded in the norm. In placing greater emphasis on state responsibilities to protect over international responsibilities, rising-power advocacy embeds further in R2P a colonial concept of the state which has been mobilised to ward off criticism of the state’s colonial projects in its own peripheries. Moreover, the entrenchment of a colonial concept of the state at the heart of R2P reinforces a diagnosis according to which atrocity crimes occur due to failures within the state in which atrocity takes place. This diagnosis erases the role coloniality plays in the internationalised production of atrocity crimes, whilst also framing outsider states as potential saviours, thereby reproducing colonial saviourisms in R2P. Whilst R2P may be a dewesternised norm, it has thus not been decolonised.