Beyond rhetoric? Evaluating the Responsibility to Protect as a norm of humanitarian intervention

ABSTRACT The purpose of this article is to examine whether, after 16 years or more of its development, Responsibility to Protect (R2P) has emerged as an international norm of intervention. As an idea, it is clear that R2P has a considerable degree of prominence within international discourse. As will be shown in this article, there has been much work undertaken in the development of its language and conceptual framework over the years. However, whilst this architecture is important to the process of its development as an international norm, it will be argued that more is needed to support the claim that R2P has fully emerged as an international norm, that is, R2P’s capacity to influence and shape the decision-making of states.