Norm modification and the responsibility to protect: Towards a four‐pillar framework

Thomas Peak

Global Policy, 2025, vol. 16, issue 1, 4-15

Abstract: The Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) faces intense contestation. Within a rapidly evolving world order, this is only likely to increase. And absent substantive norm modification to (re‐)establish genuine consensus over the meaning of the norm, RtoP faces imminent weakening. This paper suggests one such avenue of modification: reimagining RtoP's structure across four pillars instead of the existing three. It disaggregates the existing third pillar across two pillars: a new fourth‐pillar which contains the last resort use of collective force, in‐line with the UN Charter, and a third‐pillar which retains the existing non‐forcible dimensions of the international responsibility to respond. This new four‐pillar RtoP poses three distinct advantages. It increases the potential for peaceful international responses to mass atrocity by addressing the wide‐spread tendency to conflate the entire international responsibility to respond with the last‐resort use of force; it opens broader space for reconciling divergent global perspectives on the use of force, highlighting the collective and last‐resort nature of legitimate military enforcement; and it resolves additional points of contestation over RtoP including whether the pillars are sequential or mutually reinforcing.

Date: 2025
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