Implementing the Responsibility to Protect

A Future Agenda

Cecilia Jacob, Martin Mennecke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367265526
• eBook ISBN: 9781000537093
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Militär- & Seefahrtsgeschichte

This book examines core thematic approaches to the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and analyzes case studies regarding the implementation of this important global norm.

The volume analyzes this process at international, regional and local levels, and identifies an urgent need to progress from conceptual debates towards implementation in practice, in order to understand how to operationalize the preventive dimension of the R2P. It argues that R2P implementation necessarily entails the efforts of actors across governance levels, and that it is more effective when integrated into existing sites of practice aimed at strengthening human rights and accountability for populations in atrocity risk situations. The book addresses R2P implementation in the context of agendas such as resilience, gender, development cooperation, human rights, transitional justice, peacekeeping and civil-military relations. It details progress and challenges for implementation in the United Nations, regionally in Africa, Europe and Southeast Asia, and through national atrocity prevention architectures. The volume provides readers with a breadth of understanding in terms of both the development and current status of the R2P norm, and practical tools for advancing its implementation.

This book will be of much interest to students of the Responsibility to Protect, Human Rights, Peace Studies, and International Relations in general.

1
R2P as an atrocity-prevention framework

Concepts and institutionalization at the global level

Cecilia Jacob

Prevention is politically salient and normatively powerful as a rallying cry for those Responsibility to Protect (R2P) advocates seeking to advance the implementation of R2P. Not only is there consensus that prevention needs to be prioritized in global policymaking, but since 2017, the United Nations (UN) reform agenda has been geared around the strengthening of prevention and sustaining peace, which should – theoretically – offer a conducive context for R2P implementation to be strengthened. Atrocity prevention, however, is a specific agenda that responds to four manifestations of violence – genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing. The UN Secretary-General has articulated a very broad definition of prevention in the reform agenda that includes conflict prevention, development, and human rights promotion. Each of these agendas complement atrocity-prevention efforts; however, there is also a need to acknowledge the specific risk factors and dynamics of atrocity crimes when formulating context- specific responses to potential or actual atrocities on the ground.

The 2001 International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty’s (ICISS) report on R2P linked R2P directly to the field of atrocity prevention, arguing that the “responsibility to prevent” constitutes the first priority of R2P. Importantly, the responsibility to prevent not only resides within the UN, but is also present across and within UN member states, and at the regional level (ICISS 2001, 26). This initial call was incorporated into paragraphs 138 and 139 in the 2005 World Summit Outcome document relating to the responsibility of states and the international community to prevent and protect, and prevention has been front and center in the conceptual development of R2P since the UN Secretary-General’s first annual report on R2P (United Nations General Assembly 2005; Ban 2009). R2P is the first and only international framework on atrocity prevention; it therefore serves as the “touchstone” for atrocity prevention in global norm-building processes and policy frameworks.

This chapter introduces the field of atrocity prevention as a way to ground the R2P implementation agenda in existing research and policy frameworks. To date, global efforts have focused on the institutionalization of R2P across the UN system; this chapter describes developments in that institutionalization. It shows how the institutional positioning of R2P within the UN has structured primary understandings of the relationship between R2P and atrocity prevention, which have influenced early initiatives to implement R2P at the domestic and regional levels. These demonstrate both the extent and limitations of existing implementation efforts, and provide context for the chapters in this volume to show where greater creativity and opportunities exist to strengthen current implementation efforts.

The chapter proceeds in three parts. First, it provides an account of the development of the field of atrocity prevention and introduces key policy approaches that have been developed in this broader literature. Second, it explains the two primary ways in which R2P has been conceptualized as an atrocity-prevention framework within the UN. The first is the crimes-based approach, advanced most notably under the intellectual leadership of Special Advisor to the UN Secretary-General on R2P, Jennifer Welsh. The second is the human rights-based approach that links the objectives of R2P implementation with stronger accountability for human rights, and for strengthening state capacity in the areas of governance and the rule of law. Both approaches conceptualize the nature and dynamics of mass atrocity crimes, and legal accountability frameworks for regulating these.

Third, the chapter examines how R2P is being institutionalized within the UN system. It argues that R2P increasingly performs a regulatory role in guiding member states and UN actors to respond to the threat or instances of gross violations of human rights. Yet, as a norm, R2P operates in varied ways, and is shaped by the organizational logic and specific social context of implementation. Variation in the interpretation and implementation of the R2P norm in practice serves to expand the parameters of the international community’s understanding of mass atrocities and strategies for preventing them, prods open new avenues for creativity in interpreting and expanding existing mandates, and, from the perspective of global governance, illustrates limitations for achieving justice and security for populations in local contexts of violence.

Defining mass atrocities and thinking strategically about atrocity prevention

One of the key insights that has catalyzed the development of the field of atrocity prevention has been the recognition that the concept of mass atrocities is much broader than the concept of genocide. The International Criminal Court’s Rome Statute (1998) defined the crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, providing an international lexicon of “atrocity law” (Scheffer 2002) for identifying and defining the widespread and systematic targeting of civilians during periods of armed conflict and peacetime. Whereas episodes of mass violence that meet the legal criteria of genocide are rare (Straus 2012), atrocities are much more common, usually manifesting in smaller reiterated patterns of political violence that peak and trough over time, and often in non-linear trajectories (Karstedt 2013).

Mass atrocities have been under-studied in the literature on armed conflict and security for most of the twentieth century. Prior to the end of the Cold War, scholars focused their research on identifying the causes of interstate war as a strategy for the prevention of future conflicts (Valentino 2014). Mass civilian casualties were not absent during the Cold War period, however. Indeed, many of the most significant episodes of mass violence took place during this time, including in Nigeria, Burundi, East Pakistan, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Guatemala. Yet these twentieth-century mass atrocities were seen through a Cold War lens, in which mass civilian suffering was taken for granted as an unfortunate consequence of armed conflict rather than as a social context of violence worth studying in its own right. Viewed as domestic sovereignty concerns – not the remit of the international community – international political, legal, and scholarly attention to mass atrocities remained confined to a narrow conceptualization of genocide during the Cold War period (Harff 2017). Early twentieth-century genocides in Armenia and the Holocaust set a high bar for identification of genocides given the uniqueness of the phenomenon of one-sided, targeted mass killings on the basis of ethnicity/race/religion, as defined in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.¹

Over the past twenty years, changing trends in armed conflict toward primarily internal conflicts with very high civilian casualty rates have prompted the emergence of a political science research community focused on dynamics of violence. Genocides and ethnic cleansing in the 1990s, notably in Rwanda and the Balkans, were turning points both in the establishment of international criminal law,² and in the systematic study of the risk factors, triggers, and escalatory pathways of atrocity events, which then led to the development of more accurate and reliable atrocity-prevention frameworks (Straus 2016). Researchers started to ask why mass killings occur in some conflicts yet not in others, what motivates states and rebel groups to engage in mass killings of civilians, and what are the actual dynamics of violence and strategic logics of civilian killings during armed conflict (Smeulers and Hoex 2010; Klusemann 2012; Lemarchand 2009). There is no agreed upon “science” of atrocity prevention; however, a number of atrocity risk assessment frameworks (United Nations 2014) and atrocity risk lists³ have been established to encourage more systematic tracking of potential atrocity situations, and detailed prevention “toolkits” have been developed to help guide policymakers respond to evidence of escalating atrocity situations. Despite these developments, as Scott Straus (2016, 23) has noted, we still have a very limited understanding of what tools work, when, and in which combination.

Key findings that have emerged in this growing scholarly literature on mass violence include a better understanding of the social contexts in which violence occurs. At the end of the Cold War, mass targeted civilian killings were formerly understood to be the indiscriminate and unavoidable consequence of war (collateral damage), or driven by primordial “ethnic hatreds” that were largely beyond the realm of external influence (Kaplan 1993). There is now strong empirical evidence to show that targeted civilian killings follow strategic logics for garnering support or exercising control over civilian populations (Cohen 2016; Kalyvas 2006; Weinstein 2007). These strategic logics are primarily, if not exclusively, instrumental and coordinated by powerful actors seeking to achieve tangible political or military objectives (Valentino 2014, 94). Further, large-scale quantitative studies have identified structural factors in societies that have been prone to mass killings.⁴ These tend to focus on indicators of governance, security, accountability for legacies of mass violence, the presence of minority identity groups that face discriminatory or exclusionary state policy and practices, and the presence of armed conflict. Both internal structural dynamics and external factors, such as interfering powers, enhance the likelihood that a state will face mass atrocity violence. Structural factors may increase the risk that a society will be vulnerable to mass atrocity violence, including the presence of organized military or militia with the capacity to orchestrate, mobilize, and carry out a widespread and systematic campaign of violence. The confluence of these structural factors with specific triggers – crisis events such as deeply contested elections, political assassinations, or external political or economic shocks – in the context of heightened vulnerability (Straus 2015) leads a society or nation down the path of mass atrocity violence escalation.

Atrocity-prevention frameworks therefore address both the structural and the direct, or operational, dimensions that generate the potential and likelihood that mass atrocities will occur. Structural prevention refers to interventions that are directed toward changing long-term underlying conditions that foster risk of potential atrocity crimes. These may include targeting unaccountable governance structures, reforming a security apparatus that supports a repressive regime and acts with impunity, rectifying patterns of discrimination against particular population groups through political and legal reform, and supporting transitional justice mechanisms where there has been a lack of recourse to redress for past injustices, atrocity crimes, and systematic human rights violations. Structural prevention is therefore targeted at measures that enhance political representation and the rule of law, social justice, and human rights accountability. The idea behind structural prevention is that early intervention to strengthen social resilience and mitigate structural vulnerabilities within a society provides the most cost-effective and efficient form of prevention (discussed further by Stephen McLoughlin, Chapter 7 in this volume).

Direct, or operational, prevention is employed once violence has been triggered to either dissuade or incapacitate perpetrators from carrying out targeted violence against a civilian population. These measures are intended to halt the escalation of violence and protect civilian populations, and are more coercive in nature. Patterns of violence in early-onset mass atrocity situations include a disproportionate civilian death toll in a conflict that would indicate direct targeting of populations, attacks on civilian infrastructure, and systematic patterns of violence across territory and time (Straus 2016). Direct prevention includes a range of non-military measures, such as economic sanctions, travel bans, asset freezes, and targeted military measures such as airstrikes and intervention to halt an imminent or ongoing atrocity.

Atrocity prevention can be differentiated from broader conflict prevention agendas, therefore, by an assessment of the dynamic of violence in which widespread and systematic civilian targeting becomes a strategy for attaining political or military objectives. Patterns of violent conflict that inflict mass indiscriminate violence against civilians are also deemed war crimes or crimes against humanity. Therefore, while broader conflict prevention strategies may complement and advance atrocity prevention, scholars and practitioners have advocated that atrocity prevention be understood as a distinct area of policy and strategic intervention so that preventive measures can be put in place to counter the specific dynamics driving mass atrocity violence.

The United States has operationalized the language of atrocity prevention in its own foreign policy and strategic planning by associating the commission of mass atrocity crimes abroad with its own national interest. In 2008, the Genocide Prevention Taskforce, led by former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and former Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen, produced a flagship report guiding US policy on atrocity prevention:

We conclude in this report that preventing genocide is an achievable goal. Genocide is not the inevitable result of “ancient hatreds” or irrational leaders. It requires planning and is carried out systematically. There are ways to recognize its signs and symptoms, and viable options to prevent it at every turn if we are committed and prepared. Preventing genocide is a goal that can be achieved with the right organizational structures, strategies, and partnerships – in short, with the right blueprint.

(Albright and Cohen 2008, xv–xvi)

The authors of the report articulated a definition of “genocide” that reflected the dynamics of mass atrocities described in the preceding paragraphs – namely, that understanding the political utility and strategic logic of targeted mass civilian killings could inform a policy agenda aimed at preventing it. In doing so, it brought atrocity prevention into the central domain of political and strategic decision-making of the US administration. The authors also linked genocide and mass atrocity prevention as a “threat” to “American values and interests” (Albright and Cohen 2008, xv), a position that was upheld by US President Barack Obama in the 2011 Presidential Study Directive 10 (PSD10). PSD10 states that the prevention of genocide and mass atrocities are a “core national security interest and core moral responsibility of the United States” (Obama 2011) and established the Atrocities Prevention Board (see Stephen Pomper, Chapter 5 in this volume).

This policy and operational framework on atrocity prevention is unique to the United States.⁵ There is no comparable global framework on atrocity prevention to date that is able to bring together such a coordinated approach to policymaking, integrated analysis on potential or unfolding crises, and clear strategic planning to prepare for timely preventive action. In the following sections, I consider the implementation of R2P as the only international framework available to date to guide atrocity-prevention efforts at the global level. While the United Nations tends not to use the language of atrocity prevention, with the exception of the Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, R2P provides the normative and political tools for mobilizing preventive responses to atrocity situations. In this sense, the UN employs a rather distinct, principle-based approach to atrocity prevention that informs member states’ own understanding and policy formation in this area. Whether or not the policy objectives of atrocity prevention need to be framed in terms of R2P, given its often fraught political association with interventionism that certain member states routinely assert, or whether it should serve as a stand-alone atrocity-prevention lens, is a highly salient question. Arguably, the political “baggage” that R2P brings with it could be dispensed with in pursuit of a more neutral and technical atrocity-prevention framework that could achieve similar ends. There is merit in ensuring that an atrocity-prevention lens be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• Preface
• Notes on contributors
• List of abbreviations
• Foreword
• Introduction: the challenges of implementing the R2P norm
• 1 R2P as an atrocity-prevention framework: concepts and institutionalization at the global level
• Part I National implementation mechanisms
• Part II Regional implementation mechanisms
• Part III Atrocity prevention
• Part IV International legal accountability
• Part V Peacekeeping, civil–military assistance, and stabilization
• Index