ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with an overview of the origins of Responsibility to Protect (R2P). The R2P was created to improve the international community’s capacity to respond to looming and actual intra-state mass atrocity crimes. It has long been established that states have legal obligation to protect their own people from the four crimes within R2P’s purview. Indeed, in both legal and moral terms, imposing an obligation on states to act to protect people suffering in other states is—within the current system—untenable. For proponents of R2P, norms provide a ready-made framework by which to justify their near universal rejection of legal reform; the attraction of norm research to R2P advocates is obvious given that at its core R2P seeks to change the behaviour of states without any legal reform. The evolution of the R2P norm, however, demonstrates that while there is a degree of consensus on R2P, the nature of the understanding of R2P around which consensus exists is heavily circumscribed.
