Soft contestation’ of the responsibility to protect? Assessing Canada and Sweden’s norm diplomacy

The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) norm has been contentiously disputed since its adoption by the United Nations in 2005. While much of the norm contestation literature focuses on R2P critics such as Russia or China, we assess the attitudes of two states with a generally supportive stance towards liberal norms: Canada and Sweden. Because both states pioneered the development of R2P but have since retreated from this leadership, their norm engagement offers insights into the implications of more subtle forms of contestation from within the Liberal International Order. How has their diplomatic position evolved over time and how does this affect the norm’s robustness? Using interviews and content analysis, we examine Canadian and Swedish practices of applicatory contestation since 2000. We argue that the binary role descriptions of ‘norm entrepreneurship’ versus ‘antipreneurship’ from agentic constructivism do not fully capture the two states’ attitudes, which have rather moved alongside the spectrum between these extremes. As ‘competitor entrepreneurs’, Canada and Sweden continue to pay lip service to their early R2P-supporting role but contemporarily exert ‘soft contestation’. While substituting components of the norm cluster facilitates implementation by sidestepping political baggage, it ultimately harms the norm’s robustness by narrowing its conceptual scope.