This article offers a brief review of the forces that have contributed to the contemporary impasse in the formation of new international law and institutions. It identifies areas where development of the law of armed conflict would provide great benefits, yet where current international conditions render formal legal agreements highly unlikely. It then considers how to advance desirable projects nonetheless. In the absence of effective formal international law-making, jurists face a choice. One approach, which I call inspirational, is to propose idealized legal systems based on claims of justice and practicality. Much published work over the last decade seems to take this path. The hope is that the ideas will inspire and thus lead relevant actors to adopt the systems at a time when the obstacles to international agreements recede. The other approach, which I call entrepreneurial and describe here, involves leading States acting as “norm entrepreneurs”. They can propound and in practice adhere to norms with the intention of inducing other States to follow. The entrepreneurial approach entails a State engaging in a practice that it hopes others will emulate, while the inspirational involves an appeal to the international community as a whole, including significant non-State actors.

As part of the roundtable “The Responsibility to Protect in a Changing World Order: Twenty Years since Its Inception,” this essay examines the issue of norm entrepreneurship as it has been used in conjunction with the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP), twenty years after the emergence of The Responsibility to Protect report produced by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS). It examines norm entrepreneurs with enough drive, motivation, and resources to keep RtoP on the international agenda in a changing world order, after Western middle powers, such as Canada and some European Union member states, had previously acted as indispensable norm entrepreneurs. An examination of both Western and non-Western entrepreneurship efforts to date reveals three key observations. First, RtoP champions are now facing additional challenges in today's transitional global order, where nationalistic foreign policy agendas are replacing liberal agendas, such as RtoP. Second, the drive and adaptability of non-Western norm entrepreneurs with regional ambitions mean that small states can emerge as rather-unexpected RtoP champions. Third, giving non-Western states a visible regional or international platform allows them to display leadership in reframing prevention under the RtoP framework. The last two observations point to the increasing role of non-Western states in global governance and in the promotion of prevention measures to protect the most vulnerable, which in turn increases the legitimacy of the RtoP norm itself.

For decades, the world's smallest states – the structurally weakest members of the multilateral system – have been considered incapable of influencing international organisations (IOs). So, why has the label small state risen to prominence over the last two decades and become institutionalised as a formal grouping in multiple IOs? Drawing on more than eighty in-depth interviews, we explain the rise of Small Island Developing States in the United Nations system, the expansion of their agenda to the Small and Vulnerable Economies group at the World Trade Organization, and then to other IOs. The adoption of the labels is evidence of small state norm diffusion. We identify the competent performance of vulnerability within multilateral settings as the key to explaining this norm emergence and diffusion. The lesson is that diffusion ‘from below’ is not always driven by a desire to increase rank. In this case small states have gained benefits by maintaining a lowly position in a hierarchy in which large is stronger than small.

In the post-9/11 era, the label “asymmetric wars” has often been used to question the relevance of certain aspects of international humanitarian law (IHL); to push for redefining the combatant/civilian distinction; and to try to reverse accepted norms such as the bans on torture and assassination. In this piece, we focused on legal and policy discussions in the United States and Israel because they better illustrate the dynamics of State-led “norm entrepreneurship”, or the attempt to propose opposing or modified norms as a revision of IHL. We argue that although these developments are to be taken seriously, they have not weakened the normative power of IHL or made it passé. On the contrary, they have made it more relevant than ever. IHL is not just a complex (and increasingly sophisticated) branch of law detached from reality. Rather, it is the embodiment of widely shared principles of morality and ethics, and stands as a normative “guardian” against processes of moral disengagement that make torture and the acceptance of civilian deaths more palatable.