Revivifying the Responsibility to Protect: Strengthening the Normative Consensus for Atrocity Prevention

This paper examines weaknesses in the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle, drawing on the scholarly literature on norm diffusion and norm cooptation. Despite having been unanimously adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2005, the R2P doctrine almost immediately attracted criticism that it reinforced a neocolonial stance by nations of the Global North toward those of the Global South. This critique grew in force during the chaotic aftermath of the 2011 intervention in Libya, which had been authorized as an R2P mission. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Israel-Hamas conflict, and the intensifying competition between the United States and China have further complicated efforts to build international consensus around atrocity prevention missions. In addition to assessing the causes of the fragmentation of the R2P norm, the essay seeks to identify productive possibilities for strengthening the normative consensus among UN member states on behalf of civilian protection, based on insights from practitioners and the author’s experiences working on U.S. atrocity prevention initiatives.