This Master's thesis addresses the problem of inconsistent use of the internationally accepted concept of the responsibility to protect, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 2005. The concept states that each state has a primary responsibility to protect its population from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, and that the international community has a responsibility to act when a state fails to fulfil this duty or commits atrocities itself. The work is based on a constructivist methodological approach that emphasizes the importance of norms, identities and discourse in international relations. In the conceptual-theoretical part, it addresses the tension between state sovereignty and universal human rights, which is expressed in the normative challenge of humanitarian intervention. It analyses the responsibility to protect as a social construct whose meaning is shaped through the interpretations and interactions of international actors. The empirical part focuses on the conflict in Syria, where the international community failed to act in accordance with the responsibility to protect due to the veto of the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. A discursive analysis of speeches by representatives of the permanent member states of the Security Council reveals how actors positioned themselves at the 6627th United Nations Security Council Meeting and the strategies of legitimation of their actions. The work concludes that the concept has not been implemented in the case of Syria due to the contestation of norms and different interpretations of its content.
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