The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is an international norm and a collective political commitment by states to protect their populations from the worst kinds of atrocities. R2P is an example of “responsibility” becoming an institutionalized part of normative order, not only in practice but also in name.
How has the introduction of responsibility in global discourse and practice contributed to negotiating the protection of populations from war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and ethnic cleansing? What can we learn about responsibility in world politics by looking at the case of R2P in particular?
Dr. Erna Burai tackles these questions in her latest publication, entitled “Negotiating Protection through Responsibility.” The chapter appears in the recently published The Routledge Handbook on Responsibility in International Relations, which brings together cutting-edge research on the critical debates about what responsibility means in International Relations (IR) theory and practice.
The chapter starts with the protection dilemmas that arose by the end of the 1990s and shows that introducing responsibility to the debate responded to normative conundrums on four levels: discourse, institutionalization, collective expectations, and public justifications for state action.
On all four levels, responsibility facilitated the negotiation of protection, namely by leading to a better specification of what protection is and who should carry it out. It did so by providing politically acceptable terms of debate on the level of discourse and facilitating institutionalized knowledge on mass atrocities in policy-making. Moreover, this ignited debates on specific responsibilities and understandings of protection, thus clarifying expectations on how to protect
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Erna Burai is post-doctoral researcher on the Swiss National Science Foundation Project to “To Save and Defend: Global Normative Ambiguity and Regional Order” hosted at the Graduate Institute’s Global Governance Centre. She is an International Relations theorist specializing in norm research in the context of humanitarian interventions and the responsibility to protect. You can follow Dr. Burai at @BuraiErna on Twitter and her publications on Google Scholar.