Norm modification and the responsibility to protect: Towards a four-pillar framework

Abstract

The Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) faces intense contestation. Within a rapidly evolving world order, this is only likely to increase. And absent substantive norm modification to (re-)establish genuine consensus over the meaning of the norm, RtoP faces imminent weakening. This paper suggests one such avenue of modification: reimagining RtoP's structure across four pillars instead of the existing three. It disaggregates the existing third pillar across two pillars: a new fourth-pillar which contains the last resort use of collective force, in-line with the UN Charter, and a third-pillar which retains the existing non-forcible dimensions of the international responsibility to respond. This new four-pillar RtoP poses three distinct advantages. It increases the potential for peaceful international responses to mass atrocity by addressing the wide-spread tendency to conflate the entire international responsibility to respond with the last-resort use of force; it opens broader space for reconciling divergent global perspectives on the use of force, highlighting the collective and last-resort nature of legitimate military enforcement; and it resolves additional points of contestation over RtoP including whether the pillars are sequential or mutually reinforcing.