Description
This paper provides a comparative examination of the UN and the UK’s respective commitments to human protection in order to assess state norm entrepreneurship as seen in the UK since 1999. We discuss recent developments in global policy-making on human protection, as captured at the UN level, against the UK’s engagement with the same cluster of human protection norms post-Kosovo. To assess the human protection norm complexity, we engage with constructivist norm research and public justification theories inspired by pragmatist sociology. This theoretical framework allows us to test and validate the hypothesis that the increased attention to tackling global normative challenges related to human protection at the UN level has not translated into the same level of commitment to human protection at national level. This is despite the UK being one of the key global players and P5 members that are responsible for advancing this normative agenda in the UN Security Council. We find two main explanations accounting for this: first, the lack of a normative champion at the helm of UK foreign policy to advance the recognition and diffusion of UN-embraced human protection norms by reframing them as ‘national interest’ prerogatives; and second, the conceptual confusion about the main elements of the human protection agenda, especially in regard to distinctions between the humanitarian intervention and responsibility to protect norms.
