 The paradox of agreements on humanitarian norms: how to agree on and enforce the responsibility to protect without harming the people the agreement aims to protect?Timo Kivimäki Chapter 35 in Handbook on the Politics of International Agreements, 2026, pp 540-559 from Edward Elgar Publishing Abstract: This chapter focuses on the question of how to negotiate the details of, and reach greater consensus on, agreements regarding the global protection of people from violence, and how to implement such agreements without harming the people they are intended to protect. It investigates the process of negotiating and implementing the aforementioned agreements on protection, especially the Responsibility to Protect. The investigation aims to identify what works and what does not in the negotiation and implementation of protection agreements. The main argument of this chapter is that we must distinguish between the logic of the phase in which the details of norms are being negotiated and the logic of the phase in which these norms are implemented and enforced. Using enforcement to support competing norms during the negotiation phase tends to escalate violence and worsen the suffering of the very people protective norms are intended to safeguard. Keywords: Responsibility to Protect; International Bargaining; Norm Enforcement; Norm Competition; Organized Violence (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:22652_36 Ordering information: This item can be ordered from Access Statistics for this chapter More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing |
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