In 2005, the international community made a landmark commitment to prevent mass atrocities by unanimously adopting the UN’s “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) principle. As often as not, however, R2P has failed to translate into decisive action. Why does this gap persist between the world’s normative pledges to R2P and its ability to make it a daily lived reality? In this new book, leading global authorities on humanitarian protection Alex Bellamy and Edward Luck offer a probing and in-depth response to this fundamental question, calling for a more comprehensive approach to the practice of R2P – one that moves beyond states and the UN to include the full range of actors that play a role in protecting vulnerable populations. Drawing on cases from the Middle East to sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, they examine the forces and conditions that produce atrocity crimes and the challenge of responding to them quickly and effectively. Ultimately, they advocate both for emergency policies to temporarily stop carnage and for policies leading to sustainable change within societies and governments. Only by introducing these additional elements to the R2P toolkit will the failures associated with humanitarian crises like Syria and Libya become a thing of the past.
Responsibility to Protect: Research, bibliography, background. Supplementary volume to the Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty
This book offers a critical appraisal of the international legal idea of the ‘Responsibility to Protect’. The idea that the international community has a responsibility to protect populations at risk has become the prominent mode and structure of address in response to mass human atrocities, gross human rights violations, and large-scale loss of life. Although the "international community" of liberal international law and of legal cosmopolitanism for the most part projects a self-assured collective project, this book maintains that it transforms global ethical responsibility into a project of governance, management, and control. Pursuing this argument, and drawing on critical legal literature, critical international relations and on ideas of responsibility and ethical relationality in the work of Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler, the book develops a concept of "irresponsibility". This concept is then juxtaposed to the dominant Responsibility to Protect discourse. By exposing and acknowledging "the sites of irresponsibility" of the Responsibility to Protect, the book argues that irresponsibility itself can become the condition of ethical responsibility and the possibility of justice. This original approach to an increasingly important topic will prove invaluable to those working in international law, international relations, politics and legal theory.
The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is intended to provide an effective framework for responding to crimes of genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. It is a response to the many conscious-shocking cases where atrocities - on the worst scale - have occurred even during the post 1945 period when the United Nations was built to save us all from the scourge of genocide. The R2P concept accords to sovereign states and international institutions a responsibility to assist peoples who are at risk - or experiencing - the worst atrocities. R2P maintains that collective action should be taken by members of the United Nations to prevent or halt such gross violations of basic human rights. This Handbook, containing contributions from leading theorists, and practitioners (including former foreign ministers and special advisors), examines the progress that has been made in the last 10 years; it also looks forward to likely developments in the next decade.
'The Responsibility to Protect' provides a comprehensive view on how this contemporary principle has developed and analyzes how to best apply it to current humanitarian crises.
The idea that states and the international community have a responsibility to protect populations at risk has framed internationalist debates about conflict prevention, humanitarian aid, peacekeeping and territorial administration since 2001. This book situates the responsibility to protect concept in a broad historical and jurisprudential context, demonstrating that the appeal to protection as the basis for de facto authority has emerged at times of civil war or revolution - the Protestant revolutions of early modern Europe, the bourgeois and communist revolutions of the following centuries and the revolution that is decolonisation. This analysis, from Hobbes to the UN, of the resulting attempts to ground authority on the capacity to guarantee security and protection is essential reading for all those seeking to understand, engage with, limit or critique the expansive practices of international executive action authorised by the responsibility to protect concept.
"Never again!" the world has vowed time and again since the Holocaust. Yet genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other mass atrocity crimes continue to shock our consciences—from the killing fields of Cambodia to the machetes of Rwanda to the agony of Darfur. Gareth Evans has grappled with these issues firsthand. As Australian foreign minister, he was a key broker of the United Nations peace plan for Cambodia. As president of the International Crisis Group, he now works on the prevention and resolution of scores of conflicts and crises worldwide. The primary architect of and leading authority on the Responsibility to Protect ("R2P"), he shows here how this new international norm can once and for all prevent a return to the killing fields. The Responsibility to Protect captures a simple and powerful idea. The primary responsibility for protecting its own people from mass atrocity crimes lies with the state itself. State sovereignty implies responsibility, not a license to kill. But when a state is unwilling or unable to halt or avert such crimes, the wider international community then has a collective responsibility to take whatever action is necessary. R2P emphasizes preventive action above all. That includes assistance for states struggling to contain potential crises and for effective rebuilding after a crisis or conflict to tackle its underlying causes. R2P's primary tools are persuasion and support, not military or other coercion. But sometimes it is right to fight: faced with another Rwanda, the world cannot just stand by. R2P was unanimously adopted by the UN General Assembly at the 2005 World Summit. But many misunderstandings persist about its scope and limits. And much remains to be done to solidify political support and to build institutional capacity. Evans shows, compellingly, how big a break R2P represents from the past, and how, with its acceptance in principle and effective application in practice, the promise of "Never
‘Responsibility to Protect and Prevent: Principles, Promises and Practicalities’ explores the evolution of responsibility to protect (R2P), a principle which – according to its supporters – has evolved into a new type of responsive norm for how the international community should react to serious and deliberate human rights violations. Arguing that the R2P ethos has been misunderstood and used ineffectively, this work defends the validity of R2P and urges for a more practical understanding that moves beyond theory. The progression of R2P from an initial concept to formal ratification has been a very difficult one, with a great deal of disagreement over its validity as a substantive norm in international affairs. The key disagreement is not that protection or prevention are unimportant, but rather how the fine-sounding R2P principles are supposed to work in practice. This volume presents a number of important arguments that are directly related to the state vs. human security debate, with a critical analysis of the nexus between the protection verses prevention theses. Through the case study of the Libyan Crisis, Janzekovic and Silander offer an example of the R2P thesis in action, and support the claim that prevention should be more than an adjunct to protection.