During recent years, the United Nations (UN) peacekeeping system has exerted robust interventions in the domestic jurisdiction of target states for human rights purposes. The existing literature attributes the explanation mainly to the “new politics of protection” pursued by Western governments and thus validates the realist hypothesis. This article analyzes the Cote d'Ivoire and Haiti cases to demonstrate that not only government policies (the realist hypothesis) but also independent bureaucratic powers exerted by senior UN officials (the social constructivist thesis) have contributed to the emergence of interventionist policies at the UN. Moreover, “bottom-up” initiatives stemming from the virtue ethics of senior UN officials have played a much more decisive role in generating the interventionist turn than “top-down” institutional guidelines and doctrines, such as the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) principle. Instead of RtoP, UN officials draw upon broad legitimating principles of the UN, notably huma...