Twenty years have passed since the United Nations introduced the consensual norm of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) as a framework for safeguarding international peace and security. The principle emerged in the shadow of the Security Council’s failure to prevent mass atrocities in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, which led Secretary-General Kofi Annan, in his Millennium Report (2000), to call on Member States to rethink the relationship between sovereignty and human protection. Responding to this challenge, the Canadian-sponsored International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) articulated the concept of R2P in its 2001 report. Momentum built further with the 2004 High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, and the principle reached its defining moment at the 2005 United Nations World Summit, where Member States unanimously endorsed the responsibility of every state to safeguard its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity (United Nations, 2011a).

Norm Contestations from the Global South

Implementing an international doctrine is a test of its viability. In the post-9/11 context, intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign states has become increasingly contentious. Proponents of R2P have argued that the outcome document from the world summit in 2005 was aimed at rectifying the errors associated with the invasion of Iraq. Through the lens of collective security, it sought to ensure that unilateral interventions would no longer take place (FES, 2006).

Africa has been the epicentre of many of the most brutal conflicts and civil wars, and, as a touchstone, it continues to guide global policymakers in constructing frameworks designed to prevent the recurrence of such shortcomings. Nonetheless, due to the history of colonialism, many African governments remain suspicious of interference in their domestic affairs by external actors (Scanlon et al., 2007). The specific history of the nation, its social structures, and the social process that leads to the development are vital in understanding the theory of social change (Mlinar, 2019). One of the core objectives of African Union (AU) is to “Defend the sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence of its Member States”. The African Union, while in need of considerable financial and logistical assistance, has expanded its engagement with R2P through the three foundational responsibilities it has embraced—Prevention, Reaction, and Rebuilding (Seaman, 2009).

The responsibility to prevent as with the responsibility to protect primarily lies with the State and its institutions. African governments have emphasized that good governance and accountability are central to conflict prevention. This position favour with the ICISS report and is institutionalized through the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), which functions the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) as a framework to evaluate state performance in these areas (Chêne & Transparency International, 2009).

However, the NATO interventions in Libya 2011 under resolution 1973, the Security Council demanded an immediate ceasefire. It demanded an end to ongoing attacks against civilians, which it said might constitute “crimes against humanity.” Consequently, NATO’s intervention in Libya eroded consensus around R2P by blurring the line between protection and regime change. As a result during the twelfth Security Council debate in November, Brazil presented a concept note entitled ‘ Responsibility while Protecting’ (RwP). The President of Brazil Dilma Rousseff forwarded this idea in her first speech in the UN General Assembly; the main message is that the international community must exhaust all peaceful means to protect its populace before coercive measures are considered. The Security Council should also develop mechanisms to monitor and assess for the use of force (Mazzanti et al., 2013). Although initially rejected, the Brazilian stance evolved. They chose peace operations as the main focus of their self- consciousness driven ambition to increase their influence globally and pursuit of a permanent seat in the Security Council.(Kenkel & Stefan, 2016). Though, the statements from Algeria insisted that ‘‘ the September summit mandated the General Assembly to continue the debate on that concept, a concept about which there is still no unanimity”. The deep seated cynicism of many countries from the Global South has led to serious developments on self-sustaining belief and norm contestation on R2P (Bass 2013).

The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) also initially rejected the concept on the same grounds. India, for example, argued that the Council was already sufficiently empowered to act in humanitarian emergencies and observed that the failure to act in the past was caused by a lack of political will, not a lack of authority (Bellamy, 2012).

India’s engagement with the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is best understood through three interpretive currents of its normative ambivalence. The anti-colonial strand, rooted in postcolonial critiques of intervention, considers R2P as a potential extension of imperial domination and insists on the primacy of sovereignty and non-interference. The pragmatic-realist perspective mediates between ethical responsibility and strategic necessity, supporting atrocity prevention and capacity-building. Hence, demands multilateral legitimacy and Security Council authorization for coercive measures. Lastly, the hard-realist approach interprets R2P primarily as a geopolitical instrument that entrenches Western dominance, warning that the coercive application of the norm undermines both state autonomy and the strategic space of emerging powers. Therefore, India highlighted its  willingness to endorse the preventive dimensions of R2P and enduring resistance to the third pillar (Bommakanti & Observer Research Foundation, 2017). Similarly, in an Informal Meeting of the Plenary of the General Assembly, the Malaysian government raised that the Responsibility to Protect potentially represented a reincarnation of humanitarian intervention for which there was no basis in international law (Weiss et al., 2011).

China has frequently been criticized for its perceived inaction during the Syrian conflict. However, its stance can be best understood for prioritization the states sovereignty and the principle of non-intervention. The rhetorical misapplication of R2P in Libya made Beijing to consciously refrain from explicit endorsement of the third pillar. Nevertheless, under international law, the United Nations Security Council retains the authority for enforcement actions in humanitarian crises, irrespective of the consent of the affected state (United Nations, 2011b). This has even placed China to have a strategic interest in preserving the Council’s institutional prerogatives as a permanent member endowed with veto power.

This duality underpins China’s ambivalent posture as it advocates a restrained interpretation of the third pillar, Beijing implicitly acknowledges the Security Council’s legal competence to sanction coercive interventions. The concept of “Responsible Protection,” although not formally codified in Chinese policy, projects Beijing’s approach to engage with and delineate the limits of R2P’s coercive dimension, rather than outright opposition(Barelli & City, University of London, 2018).

Mexico has acted as a norm entrepreneur in disseminating the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) within multilateral forums. In 2009, it was among eleven Latin American states that sponsored the General Assembly debate, positioning itself as a leading regional advocate. However, this activism carried geopolitical undertones, particularly in mitigating Brazil’s rising influence through its Security Council bid and leadership of MINUSTAH (Kenkel & Cunha, 2016). While Brazil was widely regarded as an “emerging power” with growing global clout, Mexico sought to assert relevance by framing R2P as a normative project of solidarity. However, the escalation of drug-related violence in the 2010s reached homicides of nearly 25,000 (UNODC, 2011). This exposed a contradiction between Mexico’s external advocacy for human rights and its internal militarised campaign against cartels. The disjuncture produced a ‘commitment trap’, highlighting the limits of middle-power norm entrepreneurship when confronted with internal security crises ” (Sotomayor, 2016).

Conclusion

Though R2P had an incredible evolution yet, if we see its graph, there is a slope that is moving downwards. This is solely because the success rate is significantly less. The Myanmar case evades the operationalisation of the Responsibility to Protect, constrained by Security Council vetoes and entrenched geopolitical pressures in the Global South (Thakur, 2021). The China’s relationship with Myanmar and ASEAN’s struggle for a unified voice has obstructed humanitarian assistance, particularly to ethnic minorities in conflict zones. The failure to implement R2P even in Burundi, Yemen and Syria has raised questions about the future of the norm. Nevertheless, the international community can still make reformation within the norm to make it more effective before it becomes completely irrelevant. The present day peacekeeping operations under the Chapter VII mandates intervention against incremental threat identified by Security Council under article 39 of the Charter (Payandeh et al., 2010). Even so, interventions within a state that fails to protect its citizens from massive human rights violations does not constitute an intrusion into that state’s sovereignty, but rather appears as the realization of a responsibility which is shared by the state and by the international community.