The Responsibility to Protect and the Dilemma of Governance and Intervention in the Security Council

Establishing a balance between the two norms of humanitarian intervention and sovereignty (non-intervention) is the most serious challenge the responsibility to protect faces. Although the United Nations Security Council is the main promoter of the responsibility to protect, numerous goals and interests of the permanent members of the council prevents a comprehensive understanding of the concept of sponsored responsibility. The question of the current research is: “how the recent statuses and actions of the permanent members of the UN Security Council have affected the normative power of the responsibility to protect and transforming it into a global comprehensive regime?” The primary response is that, despite of the initial consensus in the Security Council on the responsibility to protect, different priorities of the permanent western (United States, England and France) and eastern (Russia and China) members of the Security Council in favor of sovereignty or humanitarian intervention not only has deviated responsibility to protect from its main route toward turning into a global inclusive regime, but it also shows that this concept remains as a common public debate in the international community and has not turned to be a behavioral pattern of states. Therefore the norm of responsibility to protect has not even reached to the internalization level. The research methodology utilized in this paper is descriptive-analytic descriptive-analytical based on objective-historical data.