Local Norms Matter: Understanding National Responses to the Responsibility to Protect

Abstract

Most states have embraced emerging Responsibility to Protect norm, which was adopted by UN General Assembly in 2005. R2P obliges states to prevent atrocity crimes within their own borders and not to turn a blind eye when they occur elsewhere. However, R2P's third pillar, which permits UN Security Council-authorized coercive actions, has been controversial. A few states have rejected R2P, fearing that third pillar might be misused, while others have localized R2P (adapting it to their own preferences) or have sought to modify it globally through in continuing UN discussions. This article explains range of responses to third pillar of R2P and explores why states employ different types of feedback, ranging from soft (which seeks to build broader support for R2P) to hard (which seeks to limit R2P). The article concludes that reflects both national strategic concerns and preexisting local norms. Prior normative commitments to human rights and humanitarianism reduce incidence of hard whereas normative commitments to anti-imperialism and noninterference increase likelihood of seeking to constrain R2P. States with mixed commitments (e.g., to both human rights and to anti-imperialism) may offer complex, even contradictory, feedback, reflecting a prevailing national hierarchy, changes to which could result in changed state responses to R2P. Keywords: R2P, international norms, humanitarian intervention. ********** GLOBAL NORMS HAVE BECOME A CENTRAL FOCUS OF MUCH INTERNATIONAL relations scholarship, particularly among theorists interested in understanding how international norms may influence states' behavior and how such norms are established and consolidated. (1) Among early seminal contributions were Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink's work on norm lifecycle, (2) and Thomas Risse, Stephen Ropp, and Kathryn Sikkink's work on socialization. (3) These studies and others of that era saw diffusion as a process whereby new global norms were first articulated by entrepreneurs, and then embraced by a critical mass of states. Once a tipping point occurred, process would cascade as new eventually displaced older local norms through a process of socialization. More recent literature suggests that consolidation may not be a one-way process of socialization, but rather a give-and-take in which governments seek to adapt meaning of global norms to fit their local normative context (localization) or even try to influence and modify global norms (feedback). Such processes of localization and may continue long after global has been established. Amitav Acharya, for example, explores how local actors reconstruct global norms to make them fit local cognitive priors and identities. Acharya sees such localization of a global as a complex process whereby norm-takers build congruence between transnational norms ... and local beliefs and practices. (4) He argues that localization may be an essential part of global consolidation, as it enables states to reconcile global norms with local ones. Jochen Prantl and Ryoko Nakano's work on R2P in China and Japan goes beyond localization to observe a feedback whereby, in their view, the has been reconstructed and deconstructed at regional and national levels and fed back into global discourse (emphasis added). (5) They argue that this diffusion loop has altered content of global but, in doing so, it has also facilitated acceptance of it in Asia. We build on this work on feedback, observing state responses to emerging Responsibility to Protect (R2P) norm, which holds governments responsible, individually and collectively, to prevent genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing. We explain why different governments have responded to R2P differently at international level, what this portends for future of norm, and what this adds to our understanding of processes of international consolidation. …