Description
This article explores little chartered territory for the relevance of international human rights law today: Why do liberal states comply (or not) with international norms, or rather, how do they understand compliance by giving meaning to such norms? Adopting a critical constructivist perspective, the research demonstrates that states can be norm makers and norm takers simultaneously — liberal democracies do not have a monopoly on the role of norm maker as their compliance to human rights norms is not a given. Instead their practice and understanding of particular norms and the need to modify and fit norms into the local context are just as complex as those in the post-colonial context. This research uses an empirical case study to disaggregate the discursive and practical understandings of how the UK defines its responsibility to protect Syrians from mass atrocities through the interpretative analysis of official documents and interviews with respondents in Parliament, the FCO, DFID and the Home Office. As a permanent member of the UN Security Council, the UK is a key player in the international effort to address the Syrian crisis and continues to publicly endorse the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). However, remote from the Syrian crisis, the UK has pursued a path of political transition and regime change despite impossibility and to the detriment of other more pragmatic responses. Thus, the UK has been challenged for having a weak and rhetorical commitment to R2P in practice. The research is the first to empirically reveal the UK’s critical misunderstandings of R2P in an effort to measure the normative impact of R2P on the state’s responses to Syria and therefore, contributes to deeper understanding of how powerful liberal states contest and modify human rights norms despite rhetorical commitment to the aspirations underlying such norms.
