The International Responsibility to Protect in a Post-Liberal Order

Abstract

This article considers the implications of a post-liberal order for the international responsibility to protect. It focuses on two questions. First, what challenges will the international responsibility to protect face in a post-liberal order? Second, in light of these challenges, how would the requirements of the international responsibility to protect differ in the post-liberal order? In response to the first question, the article argues that in a post-liberal order the international responsibility to protect is likely to be subject to the “Influence Challenge,” whereby its ability to constrain and influence states decreases. In response to the second question, it argues that the requirements of the international responsibility to protect would be affected in several ways, including necessitating greater consideration of questions of prioritization and requiring a re-evaluation, and potential abandonment, of the currently predominant approach to the responsibility to protect.

Unbowed, unbent, unbroken? Examining the validity of the responsibility to protect

“…In addition, individual country rhetoric toward the norm are not well-known and are often only present in literature if they are profoundly negative (Welsh, 2019: 59). Although other scholars have tried to illuminate the legacy of R2P (Docherty et al, 2020; Dunne and Gifkins, 2011; Gholiagha and Loges, 2020; Gifkins, 2016; Pattison, 2021), their accounts either use single case studies or observe individual resolutions to form a verdict. Instead, I propose to use a countries’ tonality and overall levels of affirmatory or derogatory framing concerning the R2P to indicate discursive validity.…”