The norm set known as the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) remains contested. This contestation is, from a normative perspective, not only driven by intentions to challenge a western-dominated international order. Recent constructivist scholarship on norm contestation points to pre-existent norms and normative beliefs as determining actors’ perception of the legitimacy of new international norms. The English School and empirical justice research point in a similar vein to collectively held ideas of justice as motives for norm contestation. Drawing on process tracing, qualitative content analysis, and expert interviews, this article analyses the negotiations on R2P in 2005 and compares the results with the further development of R2P within the un General Assembly. The article thereby illustrates that conflicts over individual vis-à-vis statist entitlements and over procedural justice remained unresolved during the emergence of R2P in 2005 and are now hampering the further evolution and implementation of the norm.
This article seeks to shed light on the question of how ‘meanings’ of an international norm adapt to norm contestation and asks whether and how R2P is being adapted to contestation. We contend that the reframing of an existing international norm by norm proponents in order to adapt it to dynamics of norm contestation have not been discussed adequately in the literature to date. Constructivist research on norm contestation could benefit from taking into account concepts in the new institutionalist literature. By combining the institutionalist concepts of ‘borrowing’ and ‘sharing’ with the literature on norm entrepreneurs and their framing-attempts in norm diffusion processes, we conjecture that an expansion in contestation increases the likeliness of the adaptation of the norm in question along the line of the contested issues. We aim to trace this adaptation by analysing the dynamics of R2P’s change in meaning and focus in its process of implementation.
Contestation is currently one major field of research on international norms: does contestation strengthen or weaken a norm? What role does international law play in this regard? How do norm proponents and norm challengers change their strategies in norm contestation processes? Drawing on constructivist perspectives as well as on international law, the articles in this Special Issue explore the effects of norm contestation and its dynamics by analysing the Responsibility to Protect (
R2P
) and the responsibility to prosecute from different theoretical perspectives.
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