ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the responsibility to protect’s legal normativity and argues that it has the character of a general principle of international law. In order to understand the principle’s developing nature as a norm of international law, it presents a variety of interpretations of the responsibility to protect and focuses on the common impulse among them. Although the World Summit endorsed the responsibility to protect by consensus, the principle’s implementation in practice has been criticized and at times opposed by roughly 20 states in subsequent UN General Assembly and Security Council votes and thematic debates. Increasingly broad and substantive participation by state members in the interpretive community of the responsibility to protect since 2011 has influenced the UN’s subsequent framing of the concept. The regional organizations that form part of the umbrella group of states raise awareness of domestic risk factors and support states in nationally-led resilience-building to prevent atrocity crimes.
