The Evolution of Norms of Protection

Global Society
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The Evolution of Norms of Protection: Major

Powers Debate the Responsibility to Protect
Gerrit Kurtz & Philipp Rotmann
To cite this article: Gerrit Kurtz & Philipp Rotmann (2016) The Evolution of Norms of
Protection: Major Powers Debate the Responsibility to Protect, Global Society, 30:1, 3-20, DOI:
10.1080/13600826.2015.1092425
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The Evolution of Norms of Protection: Major Powers

Debate the Responsibility to Protect
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GERRIT KURTZ and PHILIPP ROTMANN
Global expectations for protecting populations from mass atrocities have signicantly
expanded. This special issue analyses the debates about a responsibility to protect
(R2P) that resulted from this normative change. At specic events throughout the past
decade (the 2005 World Summit and the 2011 proposal for responsibility while protecting as well as crises in Darfur, Kenya, Myanmar, Georgia, Sri Lanka and Libya), the
norms of protection have been contested and (re-)shaped. This introduction outlines
the ideational origins of R2P, presents conceptual commonalities and summarises the
cases contributions to a non-linear process of norm evolution. We nd that despite expectations that the increased weight of non-Western powers would lead to the demise of
humanitarian norms, the concern for atrocity prevention has become universal.
However, that consensus is tied to a supportive relationship with sovereignty and thus
privileges action against non-state actors, not repressive regimes. Effective and responsible means of implementation remain contested.
Introduction
In 2015, the world marked the 70th anniversary of the United Nations Charter and
the 10th anniversary of the worlds political endorsement of a responsibility to
protect populations from genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and
ethnic cleansing.1 In the decades since diplomats from 51 countries and territories
created the UN Charter in San Francisco, collective expectations for the appropriate
behaviour of states to protect people from harm have evolved tremendously, and
the idea of a responsibility to protect (R2P) is a product of this normative
evolution.2
In fact, the key shift at the normative level had already taken place by the early
1990s, when [t]oleration of mass atrocities no longer seemed acceptableit
1. UN General Assembly, Resolution 60/1. 2005 World Summit Outcome, A/RES/60/1, New York, 24
October 2005, para. 138140.
2. Nicholas Wheeler, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2003); Philipp Rotmann, Gerrit Kurtz and Sarah Brockmeier, Major Powers
and the Contested Evolution of a Responsibility to Protect: Introduction, Conict, Security and
Development, Vol. 14, No. 4 (2014), pp. 355377; Nils Goede, Bastian Loges and Holger Niemann,
Mainstreaming Protection: Protection as a New Global Normative Order?, Paper presented at the
SGIR 7th Pan-European International Relations Conference, Stockholm, 2010.
2015 The Author(s). Published by Taylor & Francis.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits
non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is
properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
Gerrit Kurtz and Philipp Rotmann
seemed immoral.3 Not only had the idea that the international community
should prevent grave violations of human rights gained substantial weight vis-vis other political priorities. Widely shared normative expectations for protection also far exceeded the foundations of international humanitarian law in
their demands on third parties to act preventively, effectively and in a way
that balances human security with the demands of state sovereignty rather
than subordinating one to the other.4 Today, advocates for R2P can celebrate
the fact that protecting people from serious harm has become a truly international obligation, for humanitarian actors (through inuencing conict
parties and meeting the basic needs of victims),5 human rights observers
(through monitoring and reporting),6 diplomats (through mediation, facilitation
and political missions) and military forces (such as UN peacekeeping operations
or UN-mandated deployments).7
Despite all this impressive progress on the level of normative expectations for
protection from (at least) mass atrocities, the R2P agenda itself is widely seen as
having passed its peak. This decline is frequently ascribed to the abuse of UN
Security Council Resolution 1973 by the coalition intervening in Libya, but reects
a deeper structural change in the global distribution of power.8 Arguably, as Jennifer Welsh put it a year before the Libya intervention, RtoP was born in an era
when assertive liberalism was at its height, and sovereign equality looked
and smelled reactionary. But as the liberal moment recedes, and the distribution
of power shifts globally, the principle of sovereign equality may enjoy a
3. Rosa Brooks, The UN Security Council and Civilian Protection, in Jared Genser and Bruno Ugarte
(eds.), The UN Security Council in the Age of Human Rights (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013),
pp. 3567, p. 48. On the global basis for the norms of protection, see Charles Sampford, A Tale of Two
Norms, in Angus Francis, Vesselin Popovski and Charles Sampford (eds.), Norms of Protection: Responsibility to Protect, Protection of Civilians and Their Interaction (Tokyo: United Nations University Press,
2012), pp. 98116; Philipp Rotmann, Thorsten Benner and Wolfgang Reinicke, Major Powers and the
Contested Evolution of a Responsibility to Protect. Special Issue, Conict, Security and Development,
Vol. 14, No. 4 (2014).
4. Brooks, op. cit.; Tobias Debiel et al., Vom neuen Interventionismus zur R2P. Die Entwicklung einer
Menschenrechtsschutznorm im Rahmen des Sicherheitsrates der Vereinten Nationen, Die FriedensWarte, Vol. 84, No. 1 (2009), pp. 5388; Goede, Loges and Niemann, op. cit.; Sarah Sewall, Civilian Protection, in Mary Kaldor and Iavor Rangelov (eds.), The Handbook of Global Security Policy (Chichester,
West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), pp. 211231; Arthur Mhlen-Schulte, Evolving Discourses of Protection, in Benjamin de Carvalho and Ole Jacob Sending (eds.), The Protection of Civilians in UN Peacekeeping (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2013).
5. Urban Reichhold and Andrea Binder, Scoping Study: What Works in Protection and How Do We
Know? (Berlin: Global Public Policy Institute, 2013).
6. Liam Mahony and Roger Nash, Inuence on the Ground. Understanding and Strengthening the
Protection Impact of United Nations Human Rights Field Presences (Washington, DC: Fieldwork Solutions, 2012).
7. Victoria Holt and Glyn Taylor, Protecting Civilians in the Context of UN Peacekeeping Operations. Successes, Setbacks and Remaining Challenges (New York: United Nations, 2009).
8. David Rieff, R2P, R.I.P., The New York Times, 7 November 2011, available: <http://www.nytimes.
com/2011/11/08/opinion/r2p-rip.html> (accessed 15 January 2013); Justin Morris, Libya and Syria:
R2P and the Spectre of the Swinging Pendulum, International Affairs, Vol. 89, No. 5 (2013), pp. 1265
1283; Robert W. Murray and Aidan Hehir, Intervention in the Emerging Multipolar System: Why
R2P Will Miss the Unipolar Moment, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, Vol. 6, No. 4 (2012),
pp. 387406; Natalie Tocci, On Power and Norms: Libya, Syria and the Responsibility to Protect,
Global Responsibility to Protect, forthcoming 2015; Oliver Stuenkel, The BRICS and the Future of R2P.
Was Syria or Libya the Exception?, Global Responsibility to Protect, Vol. 6, No. 1 (2014), pp. 328. For
more details, see Brockmeier, Tourinho and Stuenkel, this special issue.
The Evolution of Norms of Protection
comeback.9 Globally, despite its deep roots among African intellectuals and small
states, the R2P agenda has become identied with a coalition of Western liberal
internationalists and major powers seen by many as dangerously keen to pass judgement over the responsible exercise of sovereignty and power by any country
except their own.
This world built on liberal hegemony is increasingly seen as giving way to a different kind of order. The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 exposed the vulnerability of the United States and the failure of its intelligence apparatus. The US
assault on multilateralism, state sovereignty and human rights in reaction to the
attacks soon exceeded the worlds limited empathy with its humbled hegemon.
The military setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan and the exposure of scandals in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib exposed the limits of US inuence as well as its failure to live
up to the standards to which it holds others. Rapid economic growth in China, India,
Brazil and other emerging economies led those countries to claim a greater share of
inuence on global governance. The nancial crisis of the late 2000s, where Western
economies almost collapsed while emerging economies were holding relatively
steady, conrmed these claims, leading to the institutionalisation of the Brazil,
Russia, India, China, South Africa (BRICS) forum10 as well as the short-lived
elevation of the G20 as the prime gathering of world leaders to discuss economic governance.11 While US hegemony is in decline, power has become more diffused and
global ideas are diversifying instead of converging to one Western model.12
While this power shift in itself does not unfold in a linear way, as illustrated by
recent economic woes in every BRICS country, international institutions no longer
can ignore the worldviews embraced by the so-called rising powers. In one way
or another, and on different timescales, all of these countries have been shaped by
the experience of colonialism (except Russia) and resistance to the US-led hegemonic order. Beyond the overly simplistic, all-or-nothing way of expecting China and
others to either join13 or replace the existing global order,14 the impact of this shift
remains insufciently understood. Is, as Justin Morris argues, a realignment in
global power in favour of those normatively predisposed towards sovereign
rather than individual rights likely to augur badly for R2P and human protection from mass atrocities?15
While much has been written about the future (or lack thereof) of R2P with reference to Libya and Syria, this special issue seeks to contribute a more systematic
9. Jennifer M. Welsh, Implementing the Responsibility to Protect: Where Expectations Meet
Reality, Ethics & International Affairs, Vol. 24, No. 4 (2010), pp. 415430, p. 428.
10. Oliver Stuenkel, The Financial Crisis, Contested Legitimacy, and the Genesis of Intra-BRICS
Cooperation, Global Governance, Vol. 19, No. 4 (2013), pp. 611630.
11. Alan S. Alexandroff and John Kirton, The Great Recession and the Emergence of the G-20
Leaders Summit, in Alan S. Alexandroff and Andrew F. Cooper (eds.), Rising States, Rising Institutions
(Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2010), pp. 177195.
12. Charles A. Kupchan, No Ones World. The West, the Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2012); Simon Reich and Richard Ned Lebow, Good-Bye Hegemony! Power and
Inuence in the Global System (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).
13. G. John Ikenberry, The Rise of China and the Future of the West: Can the Liberal System
Survive?, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 87, No. 1 (2008), pp. 2337; G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The
Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2011).
14. Randall L. Schweller and Xiaoyu Pu, After Unipolarity. Chinas Visions of International Order in
an Era of US Decline, International Security, Vol. 36, No. 1 (2011), pp. 4172.
15. Morris, op. cit., p. 1279.
approach to analysing its normative evolution. We ask how key international

debates between 2004 and 2014 inuenced the discourse on international norms
of protection, with an empirical focus on debates about R2P. The articles result
from three years of collaborative research between a group of 18 scholars from
Brazil, China, India and several European countries about global norm evolution
and the responsibility to protect.16 Working together on the contributions to this
issue, we took recent calls for a more diverse and inclusive Global International
Relations discipline seriously, in particular regarding a more universal approach
to historical narratives and normative ideas.17
Based on our case studies, we argue that R2P did not become an effective means
of mobilising political will or effective action on a case-by-case basis. Essentially,
effective instances of mobilisation relied mostly on the notion of genocide itself
as well as on parallels to the cases of Rwanda and Srebrenica, while the discourse
of R2P did little to alleviate the political and practical obstacles to effective
implementation of the common intent to protect people from mass atrocities.
Political issues such as the selectivity of engagement by powerful states and practical questions about the effectiveness of different policy instruments have been
complicated by mutual caricatures of the respective intentions. Many in the
Global South have long viewed R2P as an all-out attack on sovereignty (and, therefore, self-determination) on the part of liberal cosmopolitanists, while many
Western policymakers tend to view that scepticism as misguided Third World solidarity with authoritarian governments.
As a result, much angry rhetoric from all sides distracts from the fact that all
major powers agree that the protection of populations from mass atrocities is
both a national and an international responsibility. Compared to the 1990s, at
least, there is much greater and more widespread readiness today to politically
support actions that are deemed necessary to protect populations from mass atrocities, and even to make active contributions in that direction if compatible with
other strategic interests. This readiness goes far beyond the West, liberal interventionists or members of the Group of Friends of the Responsibility to Protect.
Gradually, principled debates about sovereignty and non-intervention are giving
way to a more constructive discussion about effective and responsible protection
of people from mass atrocities.18
This introduction starts with an explanation of our research process, how we
failed to make much progress analysing R2P as an emerging norm and how we
reconceptualised the problem instead, based on a web of interrelated norms of
protection. It goes on to outline the common conceptual toolkit of eight case
studies based on selected insights from discourse theory. Placing the debate into
the context of the history of ideas on intervention with humanitarian purposes,
the introduction identies ve normative perspectives that the authors found in
their case studies. Against this background, we summarise our projects collective
16. A previous collection of analyses of the normative foreign policies of Brazil, China, Europe, India,
Russia, South Africa and the US with regard to R2P was published as Rotmann, Benner and Reinicke,
Major Powers and the Contested Evolution, op. cit.
17. Amitav Acharya, Global International Relations (IR) and Regional Worlds. A New Agenda for
International Studies, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 58, No. 4 (2014), pp. 647659.
18. Our group has made some recommendations for such a debate in Thorsten Benner et al., Effective
and Responsible Protection from Atrocity Crimes: Toward Global Action (Berlin: Global Public Policy
Institute, 2015).
ndings. We conclude with an outlook on the research and policy implications of

our ndings.
Studying Norms of Protection

R2P is the central political instrument of a strategy to legitimise international action
for human protection, deepen the web of international norms of protection and
facilitate their implementation. Through R2P, a number of states, civil society
organisations and individuals are promoting the reinterpretation of sovereignty
as responsibility19 and the idea that effective protection is not just an obligation
of the parties to a given conict but may require the engagement of the entire international community, including, in extreme cases, military intervention.20
First proposed by an international commission in 200121 and adopted as a more
limited political principle by the UN World Summit in 2005,22 R2P addressed questions that had divided states for decades, if not centuries: when is the international
use of force legitimate; what are the most appropriate actions to stop mass violence;
and how can prevention be both effective and respectful of state sovereignty?
A web of interwoven norms of protection existed long before R2P, and it has
evolved and expanded alongside the R2P debate. It includes international
human rights norms and humanitarian principles, international humanitarian
law and prohibitions of genocide, the protection of civilians in peace operations,
international criminal justice and sanctions regimes, as well as relevant regional
norms such as the African Unions principle of non-indifference.23 The norms
of this web may conict with each other, but also with other international norms
such as the principle of non-intervention and the UN collective security system.
The practical effect of these norms and the ways in which conicts between them
are resolved is being shaped and contested not only in occasional thematic
debates in the UN Security Council or General Assembly,24 but every time an atrocity crisis is discussed and an international political reaction is generated (or not).
With R2P, norm entrepreneurs around Ko Annan and Gareth Evans sought to
change the terms of this debate. In reversing the established hierarchy of state interests over human protection, R2P was designed to tip the decision-making process
towards international action if national authorities failed to uphold their protection
duties.
In our initial attempt to study R2P as a nascent or emerging norm, we kept
facing a dilemma: in order to trace the impact of specic cases on R2Ps trajectory,
we needed to make assumptions about the meaning of R2P and its social recognition that should have resulted from empirical research. Resorting to a literal
19. Francis M. Deng et al., Sovereignty as Responsibility. Conict Management in Africa (Washington, DC:
Brookings Institution Press, 1996).
20. Gareth Evans, The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and For All (Washington, DC: Brookings, 2008).
21. International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, The Responsibilty to Protect
(Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 2001).
22. UN General Assembly, "Resolution 60/1, op. cit.
23. Goede, Loges and Niemann, op. cit.
24. Bastian Loges, Schutz als neue Norm in den internationalen Beziehungen. Der UN-Sicherheitsrat und die
Etablierung der Responsibility to Protect (Wiesbaden: VS-Verlag, 2013). See also the analyses of the annual
debates by the Global Center on R2P: <http://www.globalR2P.org>.
interpretation of the only multilaterally accepted (albeit non-binding) text between

states on R2P, the 2005 World Summit Outcome document,25 did not help much. In
a normative sense, the agreement can at best be seen as establishing a duty of
conduct, a non-binding obligation (i.e. a responsibility) to consider a real or imminent crisis involving mass atrocities.26 Everything else restates existing state obligations to prevent international crimes on their territory as well as political
commitments for capacity building and institutionalisation. This lack of determinacy cuts both ways:27 neither do the existing language and its limited weight
exert much pressure on countries to enable effective action, nor does the language
of R2P sufciently shield it from abuse for purposes other than protection.
Moreover, lacking a recognised authority to settle its meaning after its adoption,
the legal, practical and moral implications of R2P in specic situations remain
deeply contested, because of its vagueness and association with the notion of
humanitarian intervention. The latter has faced considerable resistance: a
number of actors saw it as thin disguise for the coercive imposition of Western
interests.28 As a result, studying R2P as some kind of proto-norm turns out to be
less than fruitful and obscures its intended and actual functions as a political
instrument.
With this special issue, we therefore chose a different strategy. We take a broader
view and focus on the international norms of protection while treating R2P as one
political instrument in the evolution and contestation of these norms. In contesting
the most appropriate implementation of the norms of protection, actors rely on
relatively stable normative perspectives that are based on the worldviews, historical experiences, strategic culture and national identities of states or civil society
actors. These inform their arguments on specic disputed issues regarding the
implications of the abstract norms of protection in actual situations. In other
words, the meaning of a norm is constructed in its use by the actors whom it
concerns.29
We focus on eight case studies of normative debates in crisis situations. In three
cases, international actors intervened in response to mass atrocities (Darfur, Kenya,
Libya). In another three cases, major actors alleged that such crimes would occur
(Myanmar, Georgia, Sri Lanka). The nal two cases are diplomatic debates and
negotiations at the UN (World Summit, Responsibility While Protecting).
Instead of providing another set of papers analysing Security Council negotiations, the contributors to this special issue delivered empirically rich accounts
of normative debate, contestation and evolution across a variety of public
and private arenas. Rather than triggering a clear and linear impact, each
debate contributed to a non-linear dynamic of norm evolution that is torn in different directions and fought out on different levels between changing coalitions of
actors.
25. UN General Assembly, "Resolution 60/1, op. cit.

26. Jennifer Welsh, Norm Contestation and the Responsibility to Protect, Global Responsibiltiy to
Protect, Vol. 5, No. 4 (2013), pp. 365396, p. 368, emphasis in original.
27. For the importance of determinacy of norms, see Thomas Franck, The Power of Legitimacy among
Nations (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
28. Thomas G. Weiss, Humanitarian Intervention (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2007), pp. 120122.
29. Antje Wiener, Enacting Meaning-in-Use: Qualitative Research on Norms and International
Relations, Review of International Studies, Vol. 35, No. 1 (2009), pp. 175193.
By studying the global debate on the implications of norms of protection in the

past decade, this special issue provides a window into the actors, arguments and
mechanisms of normative contestation in a changing global order.
Conceptual Toolkit: Studying Norm Evolution in Practice

The case studies of this special issue analyse international normative debates
regarding the application and implications of R2P and norms of protection.
These debates concern the discourse at the level of foreign policies and international organisations regarding the legitimacy and feasibility of any international
role for the protection of populations that are (even allegedly) under threat of
mass violence and atrocities. They provide justications for subsequent policies
and practices, but may also be removed from them. Socialisation, stigmatisation,
decoupling or cheap talk may cause actors to behave in a way that is inconsistent
with their normative perspectives and the arguments they offered in global
debates. The debates often are focused on United Nations forums as focal
points for global debates about norms of protection; inuential (usually
Western) media; major non-governmental organisations; and foreign ministries
either directly involved in the crisis situation or with the capacity to provide
policy inputs and press releases.
By studying the exchange of arguments and justications related to concrete
events, we can observe the implications of global norms of protection that are otherwise discussed at the highly abstract level of the international system. Every debate
includes claims that are meant to be generally applicable, in addition to casespecic aspects. They reect arguments that can be used as precedents, decisions
that constrain normative rhetoric and open up new opportunities for normative
justications, contestation and institutionalisation, as well as practices that may
inspire, deter or enrage actors around the world.
Based on ofcial documents and more than 150 in-person and phone interviews
with policymakers, ofcials and close observers, the articles in this issue provide a
structured overview of the most signicant disputed issues, arguments and groups
of actors of the normative debates. What were the implications of R2P and norms of
protection, according to those involved in the debate? Which frames, narratives
and context factors enabled cosmopolitan arguments, and which proved to be
obstacles? Was R2P deployed as a rallying cry to mobilise international action,
and if so, how did it work?
Not every case study can answer each of these questions, but together they
assemble important insights. Their analysis is based on the premise of discourse
theory: discourse produces subjects authorized to speak and to act; knowledgeable practices by these subjects towards the objects which the discourse denes;
and publics (audiences) for authorized actors.30 In this way, discourses may x
the meanings of issues and arguments that then become dominant and provide
grids of intelligibility31 to interpret the world. Such interpretations are offered
by what we call normative perspectives: more or less stable formations of
30. Jennifer Milliken, The Study of Discourse in International Relations: A Critique of Research and
Methods, European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 5, No. 2 (1999), pp. 225254, p. 229, emphasis
omitted.
31. Ibid.
10
worldviews, historical experiences, strategic culture and national identities. Arguments in normative debates reect such perspectives while taking into account the
context-specicity of each debate. Importantly, we did not assume that actors
would coherently base their arguments on strong principles or that debates
about urgent actions in emergencies would focus mainly on norms and issues of
world order. While norms do play a signicant role in justifying policies under
such circumstances, too, actors often use them to rationalise their behaviour
retroactively.
We identied ve normative perspectives that structured the debates: human
security, exceptionalism, anti-imperialism, non-alignment and regional emancipation. The perspectives provide broad and relatively stable responses to two main
questions: what is the role of human protection with regard to other norms and
the structure of global order; and what policies are necessary to achieve that
role? They are based on our analysis of the case studies as shorthand extrapolations
of commonly presented arguments, as well as on the history of ideas shaping those
arguments and outlined below. As such, they do not necessarily correspond to
longstanding and more comprehensive typologies of political philosophy.32
In the concrete debate on a disputed issue, arguments reected these normative
perspectives. For example, regarding the Darfur crisis, states discussed whether it
would be appropriate to authorise the African Union or the United Nations to
deploy the peace operation. Each group of actors had its own yardstick by which
to measure the question of authority. For many African states, a full AU mission
would be a litmus test for the AU to provide African solutions to African problems,33 underscoring a regional emancipation perspective. For the EU and the
US, such an approach could only be meaningful if it could provide an effective
remedy to the ongoing conict and address human sufferingan articulation of
a human security perspective. For China, Russia, Pakistan and Algeria as Security
Council members, the preferences of the Sudanese government were most important in deciding this issue, reecting a non-aligned perspective privileging state
sovereignty.
Those normative perspectives must be understood from a historical point of
view, as they are based on centuries of particular experiences and associated philosophical debates on the role of the state, intervention and global order.
R2P: Ideational Origins and Historical Baggage

The concept and practice of military interventions for humanitarian purposes
builds on a millennia-old philosophical and theological debate about just wars
and the nature of sovereignty. In his Politics, Aristotle justied war against barbarians who were slaves by nature.34 Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and early
modern thinkers such as Hugo Grotius tried to restrict the use of war and its
effects by sovereign princes, emphasising the importance of a just cause. The
scholastic writer Francisco de Vitoria stressed that the imperial wars of Spain in
Latin America should be waged neither to convert non-Christians, nor to enlarge
32. Cf. Rahul Rao, Third World Protest. Between Home and the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2010), pp. 3746.
33. Verhoeven, Soares de Oliveira and Jaganathan in this issue, this special issue.
34. Aristotle, Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 1256b, p. 11; 1255b, p. 10.
11
the empire, nor for personal glory,35 but only to save innocents (including
Indians) from such harms as cannibalism or human sacrice.36
British and French interventions in 1827 in Greece and in 1860 in Syria cited the
protection of endangered Christians in the Ottoman Empire as justications. While
some supporters also explicitly criticised the illiberal imperial practices of Britain
and France,37 their legal and political rationales were inextricably linked to the
Standard of Civilisation. This standard delineated the applicability of international law between civilised and half-civilised states (such as the Ottoman
Empire) or savage peoples who, according to the European powers, lacked the
capacity to govern themselves justly.38 Accordingly, the more advanced nations
had a moral responsibility to bring the blessings of civilisation to those peoples
that did not yet enjoy it.39 Even most liberals who campaigned for free and fair
societies at home accepted that those standards could only apply if people were
advanced enough to engage in reasoned dialogue about the implications of
freedom. For everyone else, wrote John Stuart Mill, [d]espotism is a legitimate
mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their
improvement, and the means justied by actually effecting that end.40
Unlike the present-day caricature of the Westphalian order, in reality sovereignty was never absolute. Even Bodins classical treatment of sovereignty included
the mutual relationship between the obedience of the subjects and the protection
offered by the sovereign prince.41 The rise of popular sovereignty in the wake of
the American and French revolutions of the late 18th century tied sovereignty to
the self-determination of the people. The bumpy road towards democracy and
popular participation in the West gradually turned this idea into reality, while
most Asian, African and Latin American peoples continued to live under foreign
rule. Sovereign states had a right to interfere in territories still failing the moral
standard of civilisation. Moreover, until the interwar period in the 20th century,
sovereignty also legitimated war between those sovereign nations, if war was formally declared. While interventions against tyranny and mass atrocities were rare,
sovereignty thus legitimised intervention. Sovereignty and non-intervention, as
Glanville notes, were not at all identical.42
It was only in the context of colonial liberation struggles and with the onset of
decolonisation in the second half of the 20th century that those principles appeared
to merge. Newly independent states strongly advocated non-intervention,
35. Francisco de Vitoria, On the Law of War, in Anthony Pagden and Jeremy Lawrance (eds.),
Vitoria. Political Writings (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1991), pp. 293328, pp. 302303.
36. William Bain, Vitoria: The Law of War, Saving the Innocent, and the Image of God, in Stefano
Recchia and Jennifer Welsh (eds.), Just and Unjust Military Intervention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 7576.
37. Gary Jonathan Bass, Freedoms Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 2008).
38. Luke Glanville, Sovereignty and the Responsibility to Protect (Chicago/London: The University of
Chicago Press, 2014), p. 119.
39. Oded Lwenheim, Do Ourselves Credit and Render a Lasting Service to Mankind: British Moral
Prestige, Humanitarian Intervention, and the Barbary Pirates, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 47,
No. 1 (2003), pp. 2348.
40. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1863), p. 24.
41. Luke Glanville, The Antecedents of Sovereignty as Responsibility, European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 17, No. 2 (2010), pp. 233255, p. 238.
42. Glanville, Sovereignty and the Responsibility to Protect, op. cit., p. 21.
12
sovereignty and a world order of respect for self-determination (pluralism in the

terms of the English School43). Spurred on by the non-aligned movement, the UN
General Assembly passed several resolutions pronouncing the principle of nonintervention in international affairs.44 Those declarations were directed against
interference by the great powers in the affairs of materially weak, post-colonial
states, which had only started to build national political systems within the articial boundaries drawn by their former colonial masters. Given the deeply unequal
international order (manifested by the continuation of white minority rule and the
major power domination of international economic organisations), only the new
nation states could provide justice, peace or cultural emancipation (communitarianism). The memory of imperialism45 was so strong that it led to a deeply
ambiguous approach to mass atrocities committed by fellow Third World
leaders; as Tanzanias President Julius Nyerere pointedly remarked shortly before
invading neighbouring Uganda, there is a strange habit in Africa: an African
leader, so long as he is an African, can kill Africans just as he pleases, and you
cannot say anything.46
This approach conicted with the liberal cosmopolitan effort towards increasingly strong and comprehensive international treaties and institutions. Efforts
towards an international community dened by moral and political values (solidarism in English School terms47) were largely blocked during the Cold War.
While the UN General Assembly passed legally binding human rights treaties,
implementation of these treaties remained fragmented and monitoring extremely
loose. As Nyerere suggested, cosmopolitan ideas were not at all limited to the
West: Jawaharlal Nehrus moral internationalism is another example.48 Nonetheless, authoritarian regimes such as Maos China, Mobutos Zaire or Gaddas
Libya could refer to the same non-intervention principle to deect criticism of
violent repression, without much protest from other Third World leaders.
It therefore struck a familiar note in the Third World when, in the early 1990s,
many states that had previously used racist arguments to justify imperial
intervention began to advance the notion of humanitarian intervention. Protection
from outside interference had to be bound to the new standard of good
governance, as Francis Deng and other scholars at the Brookings Institution
argued.49 For liberal cosmopolitanists such as Deng, the individualnot the
statestands at the centre of politics. We call this the human security perspective.
For the institutionalists among these actors, universal rules that bind all states
large and small, and international organisations that give a voice to all states,
provide a remedy to global power inequalities by addressing threats to human
security.
43. Andrew Hurrell, On Global Order: Power, Values, and the Constitution of International Society (Oxford/
New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
44. UN General Assembly, Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention in the Domestic Affairs
of States and the Protection of Their Independence and Sovereignty, UN Doc. A/RES/2131 (XX),
New York, 21 December 1965.
45. Rao, op. cit., p. 58.
46. Quoted according to Wheeler, op. cit., pp. 115116. Tanzania did not refer to repression in its justication for the intervention itself, though, but self-defence.
47. Hurrell, op. cit.
48. Tobias F. Engelmeier, Nation-Building and Foreign Policy in India: An Identity-Strategy Conict (New
Delhi: Foundation Books, 2009).
49. Deng et al., op. cit., p. 1.
13
The deep scepticism felt in Third World countries was reinforced by a practice
that seemed to reafrm old imperial patterns: NATO used the language of morality
to justify intervention in Yugoslavia in 1999 without a UN Security Council
mandate and on the side of the Kosovar rebels, whose own human rights record
was not exactly spotless. The UK and the US retroactively justied the Iraq invasion
with concerns for the human rights of the Iraqis. Exceptionalists such as the UK,
France and the US saw themselves as the force that must stand outside the law
in order to uphold the law.50
The failure of international actors to intervene in Rwanda in 1994in the words
of an important line of critique, the one time where it would have been acceptable51only strengthened the impression among a considerable number of nonaligned states that the rhetoric of humanitarian intervention more often than
not masked the very particularistic agendas Western countries pretended to
reject.52 A non-aligned perspective values the order and protection provided by a
functioning, if abusive, state, seeing international intervention as barely able to
guarantee either. For critics such as B.S. Chimni, a leading voice for Third
World approaches to international law,53 R2P looked too similar to the old standard of civilisation, now cloaked in terms of states that either violate or protect
human rights. In the extreme, an anti-imperialist perspective espoused by the
ruling regimes of Venezuela, Belarus and Cuba is incapable of seeing cosmopolitan
rhetoric as anything but a hegemonic tool used by the West for capitalist
domination.
African states shared the non-aligned scepticism towards Western agendas, but
many of them also recognised how coups dtat, atrocities and cleptocratic governments had caused continuing instability and poverty. In this vein, the continent
gave its blessing to ECOWAS-led interventions in Liberia and Sierra Leone
despite the mixed motives of Nigeria as their leading power and, after 2002, the
new African Union took a strong stance against unconstitutional changes of government. Its member states also recognised the Unions right to intervene in
cases of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.54 But this stance
remained tied to the communitarian idea of African self-determination: it was preferable to have fellow African states intervene under those narrow circumstances
than to grant the same right to the United Nations, whose Security Council still
had no African state as a permanent member. This informed what we call a regional
emancipation perspective.
Findings: The Rise of the Rest and the Norms of Protection
In February 2012, for the rst time, the Responsibility to Protect made it to the
agenda of the Munich Security Conference, the annual reunion of foreign and
defence ministers, military leaders and security pundits from around the world.
A year after protests had begun in Libya, the strategic community was taking
50. Rao, op. cit., p. 46.
51. Interview with B.S. Chimni, Delhi, April 2013.
52. Non-Aligned Movement, Doha Declaration, NAM/2005/SFMM/05, Doha, 13 June 2005.
53. B.S. Chimni, Third World Approaches to International Law: A Manifesto, International Community Law Review, Vol. 8, No. 1 (2006), pp. 327.
54. Art. 4(h) of the Constitutive Act of the African Union.
14

Table 1. Normative perspectives.
Perspective
Human security
Exceptionalism
Examples of actors
expressing this
perspective
Role of human
protection vis--vis
other norms
Political consequences
Most EU countries,
Canada, US, UN
Secretary-General,
civil society
coalition for R2P
France, UK, US
Central for more

progressive world
order with individual
at the political centre
States need to be
accountable towards
each other and
towards their citizens
Should not constrain

certain major powers
Doctrine of
humanitarian
intervention can
provide justication
for unilateral
interventions
State sovereignty must
be preserved at all
costs
Need to assist weak
states, not undermine
them
Anti-imperialist
Belarus, Cuba,
Venezuela
A disguise to serve
major power interests
Non-aligned
Brazil, India,
Pakistan, NonAligned
Movement
Regional
emancipation
African Union
In protecting weak
states from major
power interference,
sovereignty provides
protection for
individuals
Global norms need to be
implemented
according to regional
requirements
Need to empower
regional organisations
to help enforce
protection
stock of the NATO-led intervention, and one of Germanys leading newspapers

invited two former members of the International Commission on Intervention
and State Sovereignty to assess the damage from the coalitions overreach.
Canadian politician and author Michael Ignatieff defended the decision to
remove a tyrant and belittled Brazilian and Indian concerns, in particular, as
buyers remorse.55 In contrast, the Indian political scientist Ramesh Thakur
argued that when [R2P] is used to camouage regime change, its legitimacy is
undermined.56 While Thakur called upon NATO powers to listen, acknowledge and accommodate legitimate concerns because of the growing economic,
military, geopolitical, and moral rebalancing in the world order, Ignatieff saw
little point in dialogue beyond granting the Security Council the right to be
briefed, in detail, about military operations. For him, the implications of global
power shifts were already clear; he predicted a dire future for humanitarian intervention: As new powers like Brazil, India, and China rise to the top of the international order, their resistance to intervention will become increasingly
inuential.57
55. Michael Ignatieff, The Libya Case, a Teachable Moment, Sddeutsche Zeitung Special Supplement
for the Munich Security Conference, 3 February 2012, p. 3.
56. Ramesh Thakur, The Libya Case, A Cautionary Tale, Sddeutsche Zeitung Special Supplement for
the Munich Security Conference, 3 February 2012, p. 3.
57. Ignatieff, op. cit.
15
This expectation is very much in line with the mainstream image of global deadlock between Western advocates of human protection and non-Western champions of non-intervention, in which the shifting balance of power towards the latter
would further undermine the idea of a Responsibility to Protect in the decades to
come.58
What the contributors to this special issue nd in their analyses of normative
debates about protection, however, debunks this notion. Their ndings suggest
that the international responsibility to protect people from the worst atrocities is
far more widely accepted than is generally understood. The political core of the
dispute is not between caricatures of absolute vs. responsible sovereignty
but about what makes for effective and responsible intervention. The central controversies are about avoiding the abuse of humanitarian justications for other political interests, such as regime change, and about how to effectively implement
protection from mass atrocities.59
The negotiations leading up to the World Summit in 2005 outlined the areas of
agreement and remaining disputes. Most states could agree on R2P as a notion
of solidarity between states, as C.S.R. Murthy and Gerrit Kurtz argue, with any
international role in protection tied to a limited scope of imminent genocide, war
crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing. The interpretation of R2P
as solidarity with governments struggling to contain violence against specic segments of their populations was informed by non-aligned and institutionalist concerns. R2P should not provide new justications for interventions whose
purpose would only be determined by the great powers controlling the UN Security Council. As the World Summit created a central reference point for activists and
policy entrepreneurs both inside and outside the UN, the solidarity focus meant
that further thematic discussions on R2P would concentrate on early warning, prevention and international assistance. The rst annual report and UN debates on
R2P in 2009 clearly conrmed this trend.60
While the outcome document expressed a larger normative consensus regarding
non-state violence against civilians, driven by the interventions and failures of the
1990s, it was much more difcult to deal with state repression and state-sponsored
militias. The acrimonious debates about Darfur exemplied these difculties, as
Harry Verhoeven, Madhan Mohan Jaganathan and Ricardo Soares de Oliveira
show. However, in contrast to what many commentators observed at the time,
the unsatisfactory international response to the mass violence in Darfur did not
signal the early end of that normative trend. Rather, it provided a formative experience for the Chinese government, which accepted that solidarity with and international assistance to sovereign governments could include even large-scale and
relatively intrusive peace operations as in Darfur from 2006. Robust peacekeeping
missions have, by denition, the formal consent of the government, which, said the
Chinese, needed to be put in the drivers seat to address the instability and mass
violence they had stoked themselves. The Darfur mission was followed by several
other robust peace operations in the African continent, all of which were mandated
by the Security Council to protect civilians.
58. Murray and Hehir, op. cit.
59. On the latter, see Roland Paris, The Responsibility to Protect and the Structural Problems of Preventive Humanitarian Intervention, International Peacekeeping, Vol. 21, No. 5 (2014), pp. 569603.
60. Edward Luck, From Promise to Practice: Implementing the Responsibility to Protect, in Jared
Genser et al. (eds.), The Responsibility to Protect (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 85106.
16
The normative trend spurred on by humanitarian interventionists reached its

pinnacle with the Libya intervention in 2011. While many circumstantial factors
aligned to enable passage of the authorising Resolution 1973, the speed and decisiveness of the international response in the context of the Arab Spring was extraordinary. It had two important effects on the larger normative evolution,
according to Sarah Brockmeier, Marcos Tourinho and Oliver Stuenkel: it greatly
increased the extent of political elites exposed to R2P and the debate about
norms of protection, and it brought out new areas of disagreement regarding the
management of the use of force in general. Based on their different historical experiences and traditions of strategic culture, exceptionalists such as the UK, France and
the US have a signicantly more optimistic view, largely supported by their populations (though this has started to change), about the merit of military interventions. In contrast, Germany and Brazil are much more hesitant, as is India, which
tested the limits of its own military in ghting domestic insurgencies and the
Tamil Tigers in the late 1980s in Sri Lanka.61
The Libya intervention also showed a continuing area of disagreement regarding
military interventions associated with R2P: the fear of the abuse of broadly worded
principles by major powers. This had been the concern of non-aligned voices from
the beginning, and the effective support by the NATO-led coalition for a rebel-led
regime change against Muammar Gadda conrmed these old fears. The subsequent debates at the UN and elsewhere, centred on the Brazilian proposal of a
Responsibility while Protecting, illustrated, however, the deep support for fundamental norms of protection in most of the international community. The proposal
further helped to broaden the debate, and provided a way of constructively criticising the Libya operation without having to question the R2P principle per se,
according to Marcos Tourinho, Sarah Brockmeier and Oliver Stuenkel. The widespread support from non-aligned and human security perspectives for R2P
showed that the Libya mandate as a full-scale military intervention against a
sitting government was an exception rather than the new normal. In the future,
many countries will demand closer UN control over any military interventions
to protect civilians.
Other case studies underscore the non-linear evolution of R2P and the norms of
protection as well as the continuing contestation of their nature and implications. In
the nal phase of the civil war in Sri Lanka 2009, the government was able to rely on
a powerful discourse of counter-terrorism, non-aligned solidarity and protection
from non-state violence to fend off international criticism of its operation against
the Tamil Tigers. Gerrit Kurtz and Madan Mohan Jaganathan show how the international embrace of counter-terrorism helped the Sri Lankan government construct
this rhetorical strategy. Indeed, international calls for restraint and accountability
may have caused the government to speed up its offensive, with less consideration
for civilian casualties in the process.
Contradictory and counterproductive effects of international rhetoric about R2P
were also evident in the debates about the electoral crisis in Kenya in 2007/08 and
61. Sarah Brockmeier, Gerrit Kurtz and Julian Junk, Emerging Norm and Rhetorical Tool: Europe and
a Responsibility to Protect, Conict, Security and Development, Vol. 14, No. 4 (2014), pp. 429460; Oliver
Stuenkel and Marcos Tourinho, Regulating Intervention: Brazil and the Responsibility to Protect, Conict, Security & Development, Vol. 14, No. 4 (2014), pp. 379402; Madhan Mohan Jaganathan and Gerrit
Kurtz, Singing the Tune of Sovereignty? India and the Responsibility to Protect, Conict, Security &
Development, Vol. 14, No. 4 (2014), pp. 461488.
17
after Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar in 2008, as the two articles by Julian Junk note.
The calls by a small but vocal fringe of humanitarian interventionists, including
the then foreign minister of France, for the forced delivery of humanitarian aid to
the people of Myanmar sparked a strong backlash even from mainstream supporters
of R2P. Revealing the counterproductivity of using R2P as a discursive frame to
build support for a humanitarian cause, argues Junk, the backlash refocused
R2P on its original core (that is, the four core crimes) in their established interpretation. The debate thus solidied a shared global understanding against framing the
rejection of aid by a government as a crime against humanity, and dampened the
optimism for using R2P to mobilise international support for coercive engagement.
Kenya, in contrast, was so successfully framed as a best practice of preventive
diplomacy and international criminal justice that it became a prime discursive
resource for a non-military, non-coercive operationalisation of R2P. Junk examines
how this framing was widely adopted, obscuring how the indictment by the International Criminal Court (ICC) supported rather than weakened Uhuru Kenyatta in
domestic politics, and that it supported a larger backlash against the ICC that did
not end with the prosecutor dropping the charges against Kenyatta himself. As a
founding myth, according to Junk, academics and activists have constructed a
case of Kenya by sidelining how the success for protection in Kenya owes
more to the prudent silence about R2P than to the attempted implementation of
international criminal justice.
The most extreme phenomenon with regard to the hypocrisies and contradictions of the debates on protection is provided by Russia. While Moscow continues
to use its Security Council position to (mostly) support even robust peace operations to protect civilians, its use of political rhetoric on protection and intervention
in its own neighbourhood shows all the signs of employing parody as a powerful
discursive strategy to deect scrutiny and undermine the very notion of factual
truth, as Erna Burai illustrates with the examples of the RussianGeorgian war in
2008 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014. If Russia manages to trivialise
claims about mass atrocities and other critical facts as arbitrary and self-serving,
this would pose a fundamental threat to any norms-based international order.
From her brief article, it becomes clear that Burais novel analytical lens and the fundamental empirical implications of Russias rhetoric deserve much more detailed
attention in future research.
Conclusion
The normative concern with the prevention of mass atrocities is universal, and the
rise of powers associated with pluralist notions of state sovereignty and non-intervention has not led to a decline in the norms of protection. On the contrary, since
2005, the Security Council has passed ever more resolutions for robust peace operations and coalitions of the willing with the protection of civilians as a central part
of their mandate. In response to the brutal suppression of protests in Libya, even
governments who otherwise show callous indifference to human suffering
allowed themselves to be convinced of the need for intervention, both diplomatic
and military.
The abuse of this crucial Security Council mandate by the intervening coalition
did not reverse this normative trend, but it highlighted the fundamental
18
vulnerability of normative principles such as R2P to abuse. The available evidence

suggests that US, French and British policymakers did not even consider justifying
their strategic choice of regime change as a means of protection. Building on prior
suspicions, then, it was easy to assume ulterior motives beyond protecting populations from mass atrocities. The subsequent pushback was based not so much
on a resurgence of absolute notions of sovereignty, but on the rejection of forced
regime change and side-taking in an ongoing civil war as a necessary and appropriate means to protect the Libyans.
In the decade since the adoption of R2P by the United Nations, the most relevant
practices of protection were not the result of R2P-related activism or the political
impact of the 2005 World Summit outcome document. Rather, both real-world political action to protect vulnerable populations and the normative construction of
R2P as a political instrument represented the evolution of global norms of protection that focused on genocide and other mass atrocities, but also extended to UN
peacekeeping, international criminal justice, humanitarian action and human
rights promotion. Unlike the persistent claims of Bellamy and others that R2P
works as a rallying cry to mobilise international action, the authors of this
special issue found little evidence of successful mobilisation at the international
level being tied specically to R2P.62 In Libya, for example, it was primarily the
shadow of the international failure to prevent genocides in Rwanda and Srebrenica
that inuenced the quick-paced decision making in spring 2011.
The strategic use of the R2P concept to frame and justify certain diplomatic or
military interventions underscores the pitfalls of vague principles in international
politics. For exceptionalists, principles such as R2P provide a degree of legitimacy
to their actions, which is exactly why a traditional non-aligned and anti-imperialist
position is suspicious of them. As the case studies show, such cynicism rarely
works. Having veiled themselves in the universalist language of R2P and norms
of protection, the powers leading the intervention in Libya had to confront the
critique from non-aligned, human security and regional emancipation quarters.
Brazils proposal of Responsibility while Protecting demonstrated that humanitarian interventionists did not have a monopoly on the language of international
responsibility.
As Roland Paris reminded R2P advocates, when it comes to military interventions for humanitarian purposes there is always a mixed motives problem.63 R2P
appears to assume altruistic motives, but states will only realistically take up and
sustain interventions when strategic interests are at stake, making operations
vulnerable to allegations of ulterior motives. Not least because of this problem,
international responses to protection have reached the greatest degree of agreement if they are strictly limited, remain under the control of the UN Security
Council (as peacekeeping operations do) and are framed in sovereignty-friendly
terms, i.e. ensuring at least the formal consent of the host government. So there
62. As a matter of fact, Bellamy himself nds that there was no Security Council activism in half the
cases where someone invoked R2P. Alex J. Bellamy, The Responsibility to Protect: Added Value or Hot
Air?, Cooperation and Conict, Vol. 48, No. 3 (2013), pp. 333357, p. 345. Moreover, simply referencing
the R2P principle in Security Council resolutions does not prove that it helped to persuade any actor
to support international action that he/she would not have been prepared to back otherwise; cf. Alex
J. Bellamy, The Responsibility to Protect Turns Ten, Ethics & International Affairs, Vol. 29, No. 2
(2015), pp. 161185, p. 173.
63. Paris, op. cit.
19
is much greater consensus among governments when it comes to violence by nonstate actors than to state oppression and state-sponsored militias.
For the latter category of cases, particularly when early action has not been taken
or prevention has failed, there has been little normative or political progress since
Ko Annan made his General Assembly speech about two concepts of sovereignty.64 In fact, the pernicious way in which the debate about R2P and intervention has been tied to the principle of sovereignty, and considering that the
interventionists basically lost that debate already in 2005, suggests that the most
crucial political mistake of Annan and the ICISS was to attack sovereignty rather
than non-intervention. Alongside an intellectual and political assault on sovereignty in the United States, the attempt to redene sovereignty in the middle of
the unipolar moment65 now appears to be a typical example of Western centrism.
The exclusive focus on the functional failures and historical inaccuracies of what
Annan somewhat arrogantly labelled traditional notions of sovereignty not
only obscured their crucial political value for a majority of countries whose identities were built on decolonisation and resistance to hierarchy in the global order, but
also ignored the functional benets of protection for many in even a awed and
criminal order: as Iraq and Libya would show, saving some could easily expose
many others to new and different atrocities.
A more respectful and more narrowly targeted political strategy by R2P promoters might have persuadedmuch earlier and with less acrimonyother major
powers to do what is accepted as necessary to prevent mass atrocities, but
without the liberal hubris that would happily destroy entire states in the attempt
to remove a particular criminal government.
Today, political debate focuses on the practical challenges of enabling what our
research group labelled effective and responsible protection.66 At least three
questions could benet from constructive and serious global discussion:
. How can the monitoring and accountability of UN-mandated operations be
increased (how to protect more responsibly)?
. What policy instruments work best in given situations to address protection challenges (how to protect more effectively)?
. Does military force have any utility for protection and how can we learn from
successes and failures of the past decades?
By addressing these issues, academics, civil society, governments and international
organisations could signicantly advance the realisation of global norms of
protection.
Acknowledgements
The authors of the articles in this special issue thank the members of the project
Global Norm Evolution and the Responsibility to Protect, who discussed a
draft of this introduction at a project workshop in Budapest and many of whom,
64. Ko Annan, Two Concepts of Sovereignty, The Economist, 16 September 1999; UN General
Assembly, Meeting Records, Fifty-fourth Session, 4th Plenary Meeting, UN Doc. A/54/PV.4,
New York, 4 September 1999, pp. 14.
65. Charles Krauthammer, The Unipolar Moment, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 70, No. 1 (1990), pp. 2333.
66. Benner et al., op. cit.
20
particularly GPPi colleagues Sarah Brockmeier and Thorsten Benner, provided

very helpful comments throughout its revisions. Bruno Gomes Guimares, Catherine Craven, Aurlie Domisse, Tim Epple, Inga Nehlsen and Henrik Schopmans
deserve recognition for outstanding research assistance for this article and the
special issue as a whole, as do Toby Axelrod, Oliver Read and Esther Yi for their
editing support, excellent as always.
Disclosure Statement
No nancial interest or benets arise from the direct applications of the research.
Funding
All authors in this special issue gratefully acknowledge generous support from the
Volkswagen Foundation through its programme Europe and Global Challenges.
About the Authors

Gerrit Kurtz is a Research Associate with the Global Public Policy Institute in
Berlin. He holds an MA in International Relations from Free University Berlin,
Humboldt University Berlin and the University of Potsdam. His main research
interests are peace and conict studies, United Nations security governance, sanctions, global norms, Indian foreign policy, and Sri Lanka.
Philipp Rotmann is Associate Director of the Global Public Policy Institute in
Berlin, where he leads the peace and security programme. With Wolfgang Reinicke
and Thorsten Benner, he coordinates the project Global Norm Evolution and the
Responsibility to Protect. Together, they co-edited a special issue of Conict,
Security & Development on Major Powers and the Contested Evolution of a Responsibility to Protect (Vol. 14, No. 4, 2014).

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