Justice Conflicts and Norm Development: The Responsibility to Protect

Apart from David Welch’s work on justice and war and Cecilia Albin’s and Dan Druckman’s research on justice concerns in international negotiations, there are few empirical studies on the influence of different conceptions of justice on norm development. However, justice claims and fairness concerns seem to be omnipresent in discourses on norms: Whether you look at critique of the UN Security Council’s double standards in dealing with humanitarian emergencies or at claims by developing countries that the regulation of their greenhouse gas emissions would pose an unfair obstacle to their economic development – conflicts over contested norms seem often to be framed in terms of justice. The paper wants to explore how justice concerns influence international efforts in cooperative norm setting by looking at differences in conceptions of sovereignty and justice by important states in the process of R2P-development. Drawing on a constructivist framework, the paper identifies normative conflict lines, their change over time and how they affected the development and application of R2P. Finally, it tries to line out which conditions and strategies are necessary to mitigate the negative impact of clashing justice claims on the development of a norm.