ABSTRACT
It has already been 15 years since the member states of the UN unanimously adopted R2P under Paragraphs 138 and 139 of the 2005 World Summit Outcome Document (WSOD), and 11 years since the UN General Assembly started discussing its implementation strategy. In an era of humanitarian crises and new challenges R2P remains a relevant issue in global governance with regard to the international protection of human rights. This chapter conducts a constructivist analysis of the challenges to and sources of R2P's legitimacy by focusing on two main venues. The first is the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), which constructed the norm in search for a remedy to mass atrocities, whereas the second is the UN, which adopted the norm and enabled its institutionalization as well as implementation under a formal and widely recognized global venue. Taking legitimacy as a dynamic process, because of the ongoing normative evolution of R2P on the one hand, and its changing implementation behaviors on the other, this chapter first studies the aims and structure of R2P and the transformations it has gone through during its process of adoption. Second, focusing on its evolution within the framework of the UN from adoption to strategizing its implementation, it analyzes the processes and procedures of R2P. Third, it focuses on the effectiveness of R2P vis-à-vis the performance of the UN Security Council in terms of the norm's implementation. Following from this three-fold analysis, in the penultimate section, the chapter scrutinizes the common state-centric approaches to the norm, and concludes that R2P's internalization cannot be achieved without focusing on a multiplicity of actors and without opening Pillar 3 up for a new contestation.
