Description
The importance of the preventive dimension of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) has been widely acknowledged but has undergone a great level of contestation. Based on this, the paper investigates the question of how states contest the cosmopolitan underpinnings of the prevention norms. The norm literature offers important insights into the contestation practices; nevertheless, they dominantly focus on the contestation toward an individual norm and pay inadequate attention to the fact that most norms do not exist in isolation but are interlinked to other conceptually aligned norms in a common issue area. To address this, I examine how China contests a cluster of prevention norms. I identify three types of prevention norms in the cluster, structured by three different logics: (1) conflict prevention based on a stability/peace logic; (2) atrocity prevention based on a humanitarian logic; and (3) root cause prevention based on a long-term capacity building logic which notably includes economic development, democracy promotion, and rule of law. Drawing on English- and Chinese-language official documents and elite interviews with Chinese diplomats and UN officials, I argue that the existence of the norm cluster enables China to twist atrocity prevention into conflict prevention and root cause prevention in line with its interests and ideological beliefs. This further allows China to dilute the cosmopolitan visions of the prevention norms with limited reputational costs. Empirically, to the best of my knowledge, it is the first systematic study on China’s prevention policy, as most scholarly attention has been given to the Chinese approaches to intervention rather than prevention.
