The Responsibility to Protect (RtoP): Norm Institutionalisation, Issues and Challenges

The Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) is one of a number of frameworks formulated by the more powerful members of the international community to protect categories of civilian populations facing existential threats. Yet unlike frameworks like the Geneva Convention and its additional protocols, the RtoP struggles to attain the status of an international norm and law binding on state actors in the international fora. At the root of the RtoP’s challenges is its moralistic but ultimately threatening attempt to re-define traditional notions of sovereignty from a sacrosanct and inviolable right of states as agreed under international law to a responsibility and privilege sustained only by the competence and alacrity of the so-called sovereign states to shield their citizens from egregious events, failure of which circumvents sovereignty opening the state to foreign/international armed intervention for the sake of stopping or preventing enormous gamut of civilian suffering. Emerging from this are intertwined issues interacting to hinder universal support and acceptance of the RtoP by state actors in the international system. These intervening issues are numerous but generally revolve around (1) definition of what the doctrine aims to do, can do and should do (ii) fear of its abuse by powerful states and (i) operational outcomes, all of which have polarized the international base required to institutionalise the RtoP into international norm and law. The nature of interaction of these issues necessarily makes them complex. The main engagement of this chapter therefore, is not so much to suggest recommendations to improve the RtoP’s chances of consolidation and institutionalisation, as it is to provide a guide through, and simplify these issues, thus bringing greater and possibly, new understanding to the current state of the RtoP doctrine.