The Responsibility to Protect and Reflexive Institutional Transformation in the United Nations
Global Responsibility to Protect, 2026 (ESCI, Scopus)
- Publication Type: Article / Article
- Publication Date: 2026
- Doi Number: 10.1163/1875984x-20262015
- Journal Name: Global Responsibility to Protect
- Journal Indexes: Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), Scopus, Political Science Complete
- Keywords: General Assembly, norm contestation, reflexive institutional transformation, Responsibility to Protect, Security Council, United Nations
- Hacettepe University Affiliated: Yes
Abstract
The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) has neither consolidated into a coherent regime of collective protection nor faded in the face of geopolitical contestation. Instead, its trajectory within the United Nations reveals a subtler form of normative evolution shaped by ongoing deliberation, procedural negotiation, and institutional practice. Drawing on the Norm Circulation Framework, this article identifies a neglected dynamic in this process: reflexive institutional transformation, whereby engagement with a contested norm gradually reshapes the bureaucratic, interpretive, and procedural habits of the institution itself. Through analysis of debates in the UN General Assembly and mandate practices in the UN Security Council, the article shows how R2P has been discursively embedded and procedurally internalised, even as its enforcement dimension remains politically constrained. R2P persists less as a directive for intervention than as a normative vocabulary through which responsibility is articulated, contested, and assigned within contemporary global politics.