R2P and the Arab Spring: Norm Localisation and the US Response to the Early Syria Crisis

This article explains why R2P failed to motivate action to protect vulnerable Syrians in the first two years of the crisis. We focus on the United States and argue that official discourse ‘localised’ the meaning R2P by grafting it on to preconceived ideas of America’s role in supporting democratic revolutions, which is how the situation was understood. American ‘exemplarism’ demanded the US support democracy by calling on Assad to go while not corrupting the ‘homegrown’ revolution through foreign intervention. The call for political and criminal accountability aligned exemplarist democracy promotion to R2P, but it did nothing to protect vulnerable populations from the conflict that ensued. This refraction of the norm complicated the United Nations spon-sored peace process, which provided an alternative means of protecting the Syrian population. We address a gap in the literature by examining Western localisation and draw policy lessons, namely the importance of examining national predispositions when implementing R2P.

Syria remains one of the most challenging of humanitarian crises and has been at the top of the international agenda for almost a decade. Various senior diplomats have spoken not just of the scale of suffering but of international society's responsibility to protect the Syrian population from atrocities. This was apparent very early in the crisis. The Office of the United Nations Special Adviser for the Prevention of Genocide and Responsibility to Protect (R2P), for instance, issued eight statements regarding Syria between 2011 and 2013,1 and the Obama administration wrestled publicly with its sense that something must be done, accepting that 'the moral thing to do is not to stand by and do nothing' .2 But while US foreign policymakers referenced a responsibility to protect Syrian populations, occasionally referring directly to the UN's 'R2P' doctrine, it was by no means certain what those references meant for practice. This uncertainty is indicative of the indeterminate character of norms; their meaning is constructed through discursive practice and is thus contingent on how agents interpret a particular situation, which can lead to contestation.3 In the case of Syria, 'applying' generic meanings of R2P, such as those articulated in the 2001 report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (iciss) or in the 2005 UN World Summit outcome document, told us that something had to be done to protect Syrian populations. It did not offer uncontested prescriptions for practice. This is all the truer in this case as R2P was not the only norm or principle guiding the US response to Syria.4 global responsibility to protect 12 (2020)  It is in this discursive space that agents often graft on to a norm's meaning their particular predispositions. Building on the idea of 'norm localisation'5 as a practice by which local actors actively build congruence between global norms and local beliefs, identities, traditions, practices, cognitive priors or normative context, we explore how R2P was localised so as to become congruent with the broader pre-existing American normative political context which supported non-intervention. We demonstrate how the US understanding of its responsibility to protect Syrian populations was influenced by beliefs, identities, traditions, and practices of American exceptionalism, and argue that this local American cognitive prior or normative context influenced America's framing of the Syrian situation primarily as a struggle for democracy.6 Supporting that struggle helped reconstitute America's image as a state that was 'on the right side of history' . At the same time, however, the Obama administration adopted an 'exemplarist' rather than a 'vindicationist' form of exceptionalism.7 As such, the US would be the 'well-wisher' of the Syrian people as they resisted Assad, but it would not intervene.
In exploring this case, this article makes three interlinked contributions. First, and at the empirical level, we provide an in-depth example of R2P norm localisation, showing how American policymakers, through discourse, framing, and grafting, brought R2P into congruence with local beliefs and practices of American exceptionalism, specifically exemplarism. Secondly, we have identified and helped to address a gap in the R2P norm localisation literature. Although Amitav Acharya theorised localisation was open to any actors, irrespective of their size or international prominence,8 the existing R2P localisation literature focuses almost exclusively on cases where the non-Western world is the localising actor.9 By showing how a leading Western actor localised This article is organised into three sections. First, we analyse how the R2P literature has used the notion of 'norm localisation' to study local variants of the global R2P norm. We demonstrate that the focus of these analyses has almost exclusively been on the ways non-Western actors have localised R2P, which, given the specific claim by Acharya that localisation applies to all actors, means there is a gap in the literature. We reflect on the implications of this gap, and therefore the need to complement existing work by examining how a Western actor such as the United States localised R2P. In the second section, we explain how US officials referred to the norm of R2P and localised it by insisting on regime change in Syria. We make these claims through an analysis of both executive and legislative American discourses. Our dataset is composed of 658 texts comprising declarations and interviews by the President, Vice-President, Secretary of State, White House officials, as well as Congressional and Senate hearings that mention or are connected to Syria. We analysed these texts for discursive patterns or 'linguistic regularities' that 'create a relative predictability in meaning production' .10 The data covers the period of March 2011 to December 2013, from the beginning of the crisis to the aftermath of the August 2013 Ghouta chemical weapons attacks. This period is crucial as it represents the moment in which the US formed its position on the Syrian crisis. Far from being an obvious or necessary choice, linking R2P to regime change appealed to American domestic values and to the broader perception of the 'Arab Spring' as a progressive evolution of history. As we explain in the third section, however, this invocation of R2P and exceptionalism was highly influenced by the 'exemplarist' strand of thought. As a consequence, the commitment to protect the Syrian population from atrocity crimes -which is Prevention how the non-Western world (for instance, Africa;13 Brazil;14 China and Japan;15 and Southeast Asia)16 localises R2P. In this section, we review this literature to define the concept, to establish the gap regarding its application to the West, and to assess the implications. We then examine in more detail the Vaughan and Dunne article as the only work to apply norm localisation to the US relationship with R2P. 17 Acharya outlined two perspectives on norm diffusion: one spoke to a 'moral cosmopolitanism' , and another stressed 'the role of domestic, political, organizational, and cultural variables' , albeit in an 'unduly static' manner that described them as barriers to diffusion. 18 The main features of the first perspective were that the norms researched were 'cosmopolitan' or 'universal' . The key actors involved were transnational agents and the focus was on the 'conversion' of local agents, whose 'resistance' to cosmopolitan norms was seen as 'illegitimate or immoral' rather than 'contestation' . Unfortunate consequences of this approach followed. These included a focus on the international level, therefore 'downplaying the agency of local actors'; a view of norm diffusion that implied 'teaching by transnational agents'; and a portrayal of 'international prescriptions' as one part of 'an implicit dichotomy between good global or universal norms and bad regional or local norms' .19 global responsibility to protect 12 (2020)  It was on the basis of this critique that Acharya proposed the concept of norm localisation or constitutive localisation,20 which, according to Capie, 'represents a significant break with orthodox explanations of norm dynamics' whose cosmopolitan advocates tended to be typically Western states and nongovernmental organisations (ngos) in the global north.21 Acharya defined localisation as 'the active construction (through discourse, framing, grafting, and cultural selection) of foreign ideas by local actors, which results in the former developing significant congruence with local beliefs and practices' .22 Rather than facing a dichotomy of either accepting or rejecting foreign norms, localisation conceptualises how local actors can incorporate the foreign into the local even when it did not initially appear to cohere.
Although developed by Acharya in reference to Southeast Asia,23 and with a view to addressing the 'general neglect of the normative behavior of Third World countries and their regional institutions in the growing literature on norm dynamics' , norm localisation is 'generic to all actors, big or small, powerful or weak' .24 The broader literature on norm localisation includes some work exploring how Western countries themselves adapt global norms.25 Yet the R2P norm localisation literature has thus far tended to focus on cases in which non-Western actors are engaged in localisation such as: Africa, Brazil, China and Japan, and Southeast Asia.26 This is not a criticism of this body of work. Indeed, the choice of non-Western actors makes sense given each author's relevant regional expertise and deliberate focus.
We are not suggesting that this literature assumes R2P localisation to be an exclusively non-Western phenomenon. To repeat Acharya, norm localisation is 'generic to all actors' .27 But the relative lack of studies examining R2P localisation by Western actors does risk this association. Conscious of how scholarship 20 He subsequently proposed 'norm subsidiarity' which he classified as: outward looking; based on a rejection of the external norm which is regarded as a threat to local norms; and an activity which is the preserve of small or peripheral international actors. Acharya, 'Norm Subsidiarity and Regional Orders' , p. 97. Given our exclusive focus on how the USa powerful actor -made R2P fit within its own normative context, with attention only to domestic political constituencies, our research falls under the framework of localisation rather than subsidiarity. constructs background knowledge, we consider it important for normative reasons to address this imbalance in R2P studies. This is because an association of 'the local' with non-Western states may imply that 'the global' interpretation of a norm is taken from Western meanings. Western states could then in turn claim unwarranted authority as spokespersons for what they claim to be the 'true' or 'genuine' expression of R2P on the grounds that since non-Western states localise it, Western states adopt it as is. We note here for instance that 20 of the 37 states which Negrón-Gonzales and Contarino identified in 2014 as having 'embraced' R2P were Western/European28 while those then rejecting or adapting the norm were all non-Western.29 To argue that Western states have, and therefore can, determine the meaning of R2P is not only normatively problematic, it is empirically incorrect. No single state nor regional grouping of states speaks for the global R2P. For instance, there is a broad recognition of Africa's significant role in the emergence and formation of R2P to the extent that 'the deepening of international society originated to a great extent from the periphery rather than the core' ,30 via the efforts of Francis Deng,31 Kofi Annan, and Article 4(h) of the Constitutive Act of the African Union.32 The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty specifically included a genuinely cosmopolitan membership.33 The globally inclusive UN has also been important in defining 28 Our definition of Western countries is based on those who are member of the UN regional group, Western European and Others Group (weog Yet it remains the case that the majority of R2P scholarship using the concept of norm localisation has been focused on non-Western cases, often but not always juxtaposing their non-Western 'local' with an unspecified or undertheorised 'global' .40 To be clear, these authors are likely reflecting contemporary perspectives of R2P in the non-Western world rather than consciously constructing a Western-global / non-Western-local dichotomy; and there is of course a large literature on how Western states relate to R2P.41 Yet this latter 34 Prantl and Nakano, 'Global Norm Diffusion in East Asia' , p. 208. 35 Capie body of work focuses on various Western states' attempts to implement or internalise the norm and does not frame that process in terms of localisation studies. In sum there is a gap in the R2P localisation literature when it comes to Western cases of localisation, with potentially troubling implications, which we look to address by complementing existing non-Western studies with one from the US. The exception to this trend which we build on is Vaughan and Dunne's examination of the US localisation and implementation of R2P in the case of the 2011 Libyan intervention. They argue that the Obama administration's Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention/Protection (gmapp) policy was the US's localisation of the global R2P norm, which informed and facilitated their leadership role in the intervention. As the authors rightly indicate, the way that norms matter can differ across distinct cases, and 'even liberal states -whose self-identities include the promotion of values such as human rights, political freedoms and freedom from persecution -vary considerably with each other in how they align their responsibility to protect with domestic thresholds and identity' .42 Their analysis is thus important because it demonstrates the adaptations that are made by a Western state. It confirms our assessment of the existing literature, noting as they do, that 'these differences and convergences between R2P and gmapp conform to the expectations set out in the literature on norm localisation. In this instance, however, it is not middle and small powers outside the liberal order that are experiencing localisation. It happens to world powers too' [emphasis added]. 43 Vaughan and Dunne demonstrate how the United States localised R2P as gmapp, as well as how gmapp applied in the case of Libya. Ultimately their focus is on accounting for the US leadership role in the 2011 Libyan intervention. As a consequence, some questions remain unanswered. In particular, and crucially for the understanding of when the US might intervene, the gmapp does not 'clarify the conditions under which coercive instruments would be used to respond to mass atrocities' and it does not 'answer divisive questions about  Vaughan and Dunne also recognise that norm meanings can change for each case under study. It is to one of these cases that we now turn. In the following section, we demonstrate how official US discourse localised the meaning of R2P in the initial phase of the Syria conflict. Rather than looking at how R2P was localised by America's own atrocity prevention norm at an institutional level within a bureaucratic context, we explore how the meaning of R2P in discursive use was grafted on to the cultural tropes associated with American exceptionalism so as to build congruence between R2P and local American beliefs, identities, traditions, and preferences.

Localising R2P: Regime Change and the Inevitability of Liberalism
American policy discourse on Syria responded to several considerations, some normative and some strategic or prudential, yet it also included explicit references to R2P and the responsibility of states to protect vulnerable populations. The discourse was also imbued with references to local American values and traditions that enabled US policymakers to graft R2P onto their pre-existing local culture. In particular, and as we demonstrate in this section, R2P became discursively tied to the idea of 'regime change' , which was prevalent in the American interpretation of the Arab Spring. Yet in the American discourse on Syria and R2P there were also repeated calls for regime change, and these calls were influenced by a specific localisation of R2P in US values and identities. From this perspective, as in the Obama reference cited above, the regime that was unwilling to protect its citizens, and indeed targeted them, did not deserve to govern. Calling for regime change and democracy can indeed be consistent with the aim of protecting a population from atrocity crimes but R2P is not intrinsically attached to regime I should say that it isn't the goal of the responsibility to protect to change regimes. The goal is to protect populations. It may be in some cases that the only way to protect populations is to change the regime, but that certainly is not the goal of the R2P per se.54 The Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect argued during this period that 'R2P should be the constructive context to frame [Kofi Annan's] heightened diplomatic effort' ,55 which in 2012 focused on establishing a peacekeeping force with the consent of the parties and Security Council backing.56 But in the American ideational context, a change of regime in Syria was deemed necessary and inevitable. Indeed, because Syrian President Assad's removal from power was framed in the wider context of the Arab Spring, which had seen regional dictators fall, it was considered part of the inexorable 'movement of history'; and because Assad's fall was inevitable it enabled the US to commit to regime change without thinking of the means or costs of realising that commitment. This idealistic view about 'being on the right side of history' ,57 which is prevalent in discourses that construct an American sense of exceptionalism, influenced how US responsibilities to the Syrian population were understood. As such, calling for regime change became the way the US would discharge its responsibility in this particular situation. After their first invocations of R2P, it was not long into the crisis that US policy shifted to 'regime change' . Articulated rather hesitantly at first,58 this Obama also declared that 'in Syria, the future must not belong to a dictator who massacres his people' .69 Likewise, Secretary Clinton insisted the US had 'nothing invested in the continuation of a regime that must kill, imprison and torture its own citizens to maintain power' . 70 Underpinning this linking of R2P to regime change was a local American predisposition to interpret the crisis in Syria through the lens of the Arab Spring, which itself was interpreted as part of the inexorable movement of history away from authoritarian regimes like Assad's and towards liberalism and democracy. The construction of the situation in Syria as part of a historic force sweeping the Middle East resonated at that time with the Obama administration's attempts to reset US foreign policy after the perceived failures of the Bush administration in that region. This construction also resonated with local values and convictions in a teleological vision of history, thus providing the 'logical' link between R2P and regime change and a specific localisation of R2P.
The inevitability of change was expressed unanimously by the Obama administration.71 As Obama declared, 'ultimately, this dictator will fall, as dictators in the past have fallen' .72 The Assad regime is thus doomed to an 'inevitable collapse' .73 Likewise, Clinton insisted on 'the inevitable fall of Assad' in the same way as her successor Kerry did.74 As Clinton bluntly expressed in 2011: global responsibility to protect 12 (2020) 246-270 'Look, Assad's going to be gone; it's just a question of time' .75 Some even went as far as comparing the Assad regime to a 'dead man walking' , insisting that the 'real question' was not whether the regime could survive but rather how many steps it could still take.76 For Obama, Assad was using 'the repressive tactics of the past'77 and 'he and his regime will be left in the past [while] the courageous Syrian people who have demonstrated in the streets will determine its future' .78 As the following section demonstrates, this interpretation of the Syria situation as a democratic revolution that was on the right side of history, and therefore destined to succeed, resonated especially well with a sub-discourse of American exceptionalism referred to as 'exemplarism' . In the discursive context it created, the US should not corrupt a 'homegrown revolution' by intervening on its behalf. Rather, it should support that revolution politically and rhetorically by insisting on the overthrow of the regime, which it assumed was inevitable.

R2P and American 'Exemplarism'
The Arab Spring narrative and the 'inevitability' of the triumph of democratic revolutions thus enabled US officials to call for regime change without answering the second order questions of how to bring that about; and, because that narrative filtered the way US officials perceived America's responsibility to protect, it enabled them to claim this was properly discharged by calling for political and criminal accountability. Underpinning this approach of course was a reluctance to commit US forces to the conflict, but that 'realist' impulse could only be reconciled with R2P once the norm had been 'localised' by an exceptionalist discourse. This is because the 'exemplarist' sub-discourse of American exceptionalism insists that it was appropriate for the United States to remain on the sidelines of what essentially was an uprising of the Syrian people against the Assad regime. Indeed, because of the dominance of the Arab Spring framing, the vulnerability of the Syrian population to atrocity crimes became fused with this exceptionalist narrative which focused on the ideal of a homegrown and indigenous 'revolution' for liberty that was reminiscent of the history of the US itself. Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions, and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the wellwisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own … She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all wars of interest and intrigue … She might become the dictatress of the world. She would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit.80 79 Brands This exemplarist approach -the US would support democratic values 'by living them' -was evident in Obama's foreign policy in the years preceding the Syrian crisis. The US would 'not seek to impose these values through force' .81 Democracy and individual empowerment, Obama's first National Security Strategy insisted, 'need not come at the expense of cherished identities';82 and, as the President told his audience at Cairo University, 'no system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other' . Each nation, he added, 'gives life to this principle in its own way, grounded in the traditions of its own people' . But this pluralist sensitivity did not lessen the commitment 'to governments that reflect the will of the people' or 'an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed' . These the President insisted 'are not just American ideas, they are human rights, and that is why we will support them everywhere' . 83 This particularly American (local) exemplarist tradition became very important in the Syrian case as R2P was interpreted through it. In this localisation of R2P, a key element was the fact that the ultimate responsibility lay with the Syrian 'people' (and not with outside actors), which is in contrast to R2P language that talks about protecting 'populations' , presumably because 'population' is apolitical (and thus legitimately humanitarian and universal), in a way that 'the people' is not, especially in its associations to American values (for example, 'we the people' and 'a government of, for and by the people'). It was only through their own efforts to liberate themselves that the Syrian 'people' could genuinely protect itself from the Syrian regime. As bluntly put by Ford: 'Ultimately this is a Syrian conflict. It is not an American conflict' . 84 Obama also confirmed this view when arguing that 'we're not putting our troops in the middle of somebody else's war'85 and that 'we cannot resolve someone else's civil war through force' .86 He explained that: It is up to the Syrian people to choose their own leaders, and we have heard their strong desire that there not be foreign intervention in their movement … It is time for the Syrian people to determine their own destiny, and we will continue to stand firmly on their side.87 The emphasis was thus clearly on the responsibility of the Syrian people themselves: 'the ultimate destiny of the Syrian regime and the Syrian people lies with the people themselves' .88 As early as November 2011, Secretary Clinton was also distancing the US from the Arab Spring movements: 'These revolutions are not ours. They are not by us, for us, or against us' .89 As a result, Syrians 'are going to have to resolve that issue' .90 In fact, as Clinton added, 'many of the choices ahead are, honestly, not ours to make' .91 In essence, then, the Syrian crisis became 'their' -that is, the Syrians' -'revolution' and responsibility, while an R2P framing would have made Syrian 'vulnerability' a US responsibility. 92 The exemplarist framing in fact made the Syrian revolution an opportunity and reduced US responsibilities in ways that could be discharged through a rhetorical rather than material commitment. global responsibility to protect 12 (2020) 246-270 It might be argued that the exemplarist tradition was present in the Obama administration's thinking prior to the Syrian crisis, which of course saw the United States militarily intervene to protect the Libyan population by overthrowing the Ghaddafi regime. This begs the question of why this localised version of R2P, which we argue was behind non-intervention in Syria, led to a very different policy in Libya. Two points can be made in response. First, there was an understanding, often expressed in official discourse, that the Syria situation was different to the Libyan one;93 and second, even in the Libyan situation, US policy drew on the exemplarist position to justify the decision not to put 'boots on the ground' . This failure to intervene, especially with respect to Syria, raised a different realist concern, one that lamented the mismatch in policy ends and means. But again, by viewing the situation through the prism of the Arab Spring and the progress of history, and by framing US responsibility in terms of the exemplarist tradition, US policymakers were able to claim they were acting appropriately, despite the ends/means mismatch and despite the manifest failure to protect.
Of course, the discursive trope that 'Syria is not Libya' implied that 'Syria' was potentially another 'Iraq' for the US; the ghost of which is evident in the following exchange between Congressman Collins concerned, a homegrown revolution that the US was not implicated in, it was right to remain on the sidelines. As argued in the Senate, for instance: 'At the end of the day, it is up to the Syrians, through a political process, to determine their own government' . 96 Our argument then is that the US official discourse constructed its responsibility to protect the Syrian population in a way that grafted it on to the traditional ways of thinking and speaking that are deeply embedded in American culture. That discourse then refracted the situation as a 'democratic revolution' that the US should support by calling for regime change while remaining on the sidelines of the conflict that ensued. Vulnerable populations would be protected once the Assad regime was replaced and held accountable for its crimes; and that would not take long, and the costs would be limited, because the lens also portrayed the Assad regime as doomed. This then is how a particular predisposition, which we identify as American exemplarism, helped to localise R2P. But it was far from being the only option on the table, and R2P could have been localised differently.
Indeed, calls for intervention were regularly heard in the legislative branch and in the press.97 These calls for action were linked to the identity of the US itself as a vanguard state: as put by Congressman Fortenberry: 'The United States is not going to stand by idly and watch this kind of brutality. It is not who we are' .98 Or as Congressman Ackerman expressed it: 'We can't just be sitting here while these people are being slaughtered and maimed … It is unfair. It is global responsibility to protect 12 (2020) 246-270 inhumane. It is unworthy of us as a society' . 99 The Syrian situation became a 'moral imperative': 'we and all other responsible nations have a moral imperative to ensure that Bashar al-Assad is removed from power as soon as possible' . 100 Yet even here it is interesting to note that the moral imperative to protect the Syrian people from inhumane action also translated into the removal of the Assad regime and illustrates again the localisation of R2P so that it could be grafted on to an American predisposition to support democratic revolutions. Arguably this 'vindicationist' approach,101 whereby America would match the ends of regime change with the material means of bringing it about through military intervention, was more responsible than the 'exemplarist' approach that encouraged the revolutionaries while doing nothing to protect the population. Yet that was not the position of the administration, at least in this early period of the conflict.

Conclusion
In this article we have examined the US response to the early Syria crisis, examining how it was framed in official discourse. We found that the situation was interpreted as a humanitarian crisis that triggered international society's responsibility to protect, but that this was not the only significant framing. 'Syria' was also understood in the context of the Arab Spring, and a discourse that put democratic movements on 'the right side of history' forecast the inevitable downfall of regimes like Assad's without US intervention. This enabled US officials to reconstruct a national identity that was committed to democratic change while being sensitive to the harm that US power could cause. The US approach to discharging its responsibility to protect, in other words, was localised in the sense that the humanitarian crisis was refracted through a lens that resonated strongly with America's own identity as a state that is exceptional because of its position in the history of democratic revolutions. This meant President Obama, despite his professed Realism, was disinclined or unable to do anything other than call on Assad to go, even when in 2012 the global responsibility to protect 12 (2020) 246-270 was an obstacle to alternative processes of protection, localisation theory can help explain R2P's failure in Syria.