The use of the veto by Security Council members has played a central role in the international community’s failure to prevent atrocity situations. As a result, proposals have been put forward to restrain the use of the veto and are commonly referred to as the ‘responsibility not to veto’ (RNTV). So far, existing research has focused on the history of the RNTV and the strengths and weaknesses of specific proposals. However, this article is interested in a different question: does the RNTV constitute an emerging norm that is progressively leading to behavioural change from veto users and other members of the international community? Drawing on norm research and an extensive discourse analysis of over 5,500 statements made during Security Council and General Assembly debates between 1990 and 2023, this article argues that it does. To do so, it clarifies what an emerging norm is, the impact it can have, and how to trace it. Through this analysis, this article not only contributes to our understanding of the RNTV and broader debates on the Security Council but also promotes a stronger understanding of ongoing change in international relations by emphasising the impact emerging norms can have and ways to trace them.

The meaning of norms is empirically contested. Supposing an inherent instability of norm meaning, contestation, therefore, represents a fundamental conceptual challenge to the mainstream view on norms as shared understandings. By offering a grammatical reading of Antje Wiener’s approach to contestation, we examine how norm research addresses this challenge to its theoretical core assumption. We argue that the grammar of Wiener’s approach, despite its reflexive starting point, ultimately reintroduces an understanding of norms as facts and leads to a normative ‘politics of reality’. This effectively turns contestation into a disruption of the ‘normal’ state of norms. Demonstrating the challenges of theorising norms with rather than against contestation, the article concludes that norm research has yet to find ways to account for contestation ‘all the way down’ in order to sustain norms as a productive analytical concept in IR.