Addressing dissent, also known as ‘rejectionism’, will broaden and deepen the global consensus on the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle. However, how should scholars understand the objections raised by state critics? To answer this question, I analyse R2P opposition as presented in official UN transcripts, voting records, and resolutions. The article reveals that six related themes of dissent exist with varying degrees of emphasis amongst opponents. Conventional depictions of R2P opposition, such as the absolute sovereignty or North vs. South explanations, are therefore inadequate representations of the diverse range of arguments employed by dissenters. Ultimately, I conclude that in order to build consensus at the expense of dissent, the principle should be further developed around four key notions: 1) non-coercive prevention and domestic capacity building, 2) enhanced prudential criteria for intervention, 3) global norm entrepreneurship from the Global South, and 4) veto restraint in R2P scenarios.

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The purpose of this paper is to re-theorize the evolution of the Responsibility to Protect RtoP in the UN through to 2011, the apogee of liberal interventionism in the post-Cold War period. Contrary to a common argument in existing literature, and notwithstanding the adoption of the concept as an annual agenda item of the General Assembly, international contestation is not about implementation as neatly separated from meaning, but rather definition or interpretation. To better understand the boundaries of intergovernmental understanding, we need to interrogate the language or terms of the debate, particularly the ways in which those terms have been practiced. There have been two Responsibilities to Protect in international society. A discursive practice called Southern RtoP, traced through UN-based political dialogue, contests a meaning that has been prevalent for 20 years at least: that of Northern RtoP. This article shows evaluative nuance and data from the perspective of the Global South and provides a discursive history of an ongoing non-aligned protest against a NATO-associated theory of defeasible sovereignty.

This article argues that contemporary debates around intervention, and especially humanitarian intervention, have misunderstood the meaning of these concepts in Cold War international society. By comparing a specific kind of humanitarian interventionism with a specific kind of internationalism, that of a revolutionist strain of Third World practice, it shows that existing studies have paid too little attention to discursive entanglements of coercion, self-determination, and humanitarianism. The Angola case provides a significant illustration: in 1975 the problem of intervention comes to be tied not just to dictatorial interference, but to a logic of self-determination, which is itself tied to causes of anticolonialism and anti-racism. It is too easy to say that the period’s rules of non-intervention precluded the legitimate coercive prevention of atrocities and related international crimes. Particular practices of internationalism, linked to the promotion of self-determination, provided a basis for enforcing international human rights treaties, including the Genocide Convention. All this seems very different from what we usually know of the legitimacy of saving strangers and the character of Third World organising in the mid-20th century.