ABSTRACT
This concluding chapter begins by examining the difficulties the international community has faced in recent decades, from the Arab Spring to the widespread emergence of neo-nationalist populisms. It examines the most recent conceptual innovations that have emerged from recent contestation over R2P before evaluating the argument that, as a ‘hollow’ norm, the R2P has irredeemably failed to affect the dynamics of international responsibility in any meaningful way.
It concludes by suggesting that strengthening the social fields of responsibility on which the R2P regime of responsibility depends for its energized enactment may require engaging in a much deeper, more diffuse, and far-ranging discussion of how obligations ought to be distributed and how relations of answerability ought to be arranged. Mobilizing effective responses to pre-empt crises will continue to depend on activation of care, concern, and the will to sacrifice in domestic populations of comfortable states who are quite used to ignoring, rationalizing, or distancing themselves from the suffering of faraway others, and who must rarely concern themselves with the challenge of justifying their attitudes and actions.
