The Responsibility to Protect

From Promise to Practice

Alex J. Bellamy, Edward C. Luck

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781509512447, 9781509512430
• eBook ISBN: 9781509512478
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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.

Chapter One
R2P as Principle and Policy

The responsibility to protect (R2P) is a normative response to a particular set of challenges to public policy. It did not emerge from nowhere, as its roots can be traced to decades of failure to anticipate, prevent, and curb atrocity crimes. These failures had consequences not only for the tens of millions of people who had lost their lives, their dignity, or their loved ones to such crimes, but also for the viability and character of their societies and for the legitimacy of international law and institutions. These episodes of mass killing, forced displacement, and sexual and gender-based violence had left deep and lasting scars on the human condition. The repeated inability or unwillingness to develop principles, strategies, policies, instruments, and practices for effective prevention and protection had raised troubling doubts about public policy priorities and about the efficacy of institutions on many levels. So this book begins with a brief look at the seminal events and conceptual innovations of the 1990s that both shaped the etiology and evolution of R2P and laid the political foundation for its development as a core principle of and standard for public policy.

The first four sections of this chapter address critical elements of the 1990s’ experience that led to the birth of R2P: (1) the human security paradigm; (2) the focus on vulnerable populations; (3) normative, institutional, and operational developments in Africa; and (4) lessons from the searing atrocities in Rwanda and Srebrenica. These developments both propelled and shaped the effort to develop more effective responses to the challenges to public policy presented by atrocity crimes. The final three sections of the chapter assess the main elements of the three successive conceptions of R2P that emerged in 2001, 2005, and 2009 respectively, as the principle moved closer to implementation. The fifth section considers the mandate, assumptions, and conclusions of the pathbreaking 2001 report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) that coined the term “responsibility to protect.” In the sixth section, the three paragraphs of the Outcome Document of the 2005 World Summit that were devoted to R2P are compared and contrasted to the initial conception of R2P presented by the ICISS report four years earlier. The seventh and final section explains how the 2009 implementation report by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon strove to translate the agreed language of the 2005 Outcome Document into a comprehensive and sustainable strategy for moving from promise to practice.

In relating the 2001, 2005, and 2009 versions of R2P, the chapter addresses how and why the following five fundamental questions were handled somewhat differently at each juncture:

• What is the problem that R2P is meant to address?
• Who is responsible for addressing it?
• What tools could be both effective and appropriate for addressing it?
• Who should be authorized to wield those tools in various circumstances?
• How should the articulation and application of the R2P principle be conditioned by other widely accepted norms and principles?

Understandings about what R2P is and is meant to accomplish changed in substantial ways over those eight years. On the operational side, R2P was refined through a combination of political exigencies and practical experience. On the normative side, R2P's metamorphosis from a concept to a principle to an emerging norm proceeded with unusual alacrity. As explained in chapter 2, there are compelling reasons to conclude that R2P has developed since 2009 into a norm (or standard of behavior), as the term is defined in the social sciences.¹ By focusing on how rapid and far-reaching the evolution of R2P was over those years, chapter 1 also sheds light on why the concept so often has been subject to manipulation or misunderstanding despite (or sometimes because of) all of the attention it has garnered in scholarly and intergovernmental debate. This chapter also concludes, more hopefully, that R2P has reached a stage of conceptual and normative maturity, so that its implementation in policy and practice – the focus of this volume – can proceed as conditions permit.

The Promise of the 1990s: Human Security

The decade of the 1990s opened with high expectations. The conclusion of the four-decades-long Cold War appeared to offer unprecedented opportunities for forging international consensus, including in the UN Security Council, for easing tensions and identifying common ground for resolving a number of long-running conflicts and for strengthening international law and institutions. In September 1991, UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar welcomed the “renaissance of the Organization,” as “the extinction of the bipolarity associated with the cold war has no doubt removed the factor that virtually immobilized international relations over four decades.”² When the Soviet representative – the USSR had not yet imploded – voted for Security Council Resolution 678 (1990) of November 29, 1990 to authorize the member states “to use all necessary means to uphold and implement” its earlier resolutions aimed at reversing the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, it was the first time that the coercive use of force under Chapter VII of the Charter had been authorized in a vote that included all members of the Council.

Indeed, the number of vetoes cast in the Council dropped dramatically during the first half of the 1990s, while the number of enforcement resolutions passed under Chapter VII soared.³ Meeting for the first time at the heads-of-state level in January 1992, the Council asked the new Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali of Egypt, to prepare a report on a range of peace and security challenges.⁴ Though stemming mass atrocity crimes was not among the issues to be considered, the Secretary-General's subsequent report, An Agenda for Peace: Preventive Diplomacy, Peacemaking, and Peacekeeping, did flag the importance of humanitarian assistance for preventing conflicts.⁵ More consequently, he acknowledged that “the time of absolute and exclusive sovereignty . . . has passed; its theory was never matched by reality.”⁶

The end of the Cold War permitted capitals and international institutions to shift some attention from more globally existential issues, such as nuclear annihilation, to more immediate threats to individuals, communities, and societies. A range of scholars, experts, and commentators called for raising the political profile of human security concerns alongside more traditional concerns about the security of states and borders. At the United Nations, the concept of human security was introduced in the 1994 Human Development Report. As it commented, “The con...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• IFC
• Dedication
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: R2P as Principle and Policy
• Chapter Two: R2P in World Politics
• Chapter Three: Unexpected Challenges and Opportunities
• Chapter Four: In Search of the International Community
• Chapter Five: The Domestic Dimensions
• Chapter Six: The Challenge of Prevention
• Chapter Seven: Making a Difference: Lessons from Experience
• Conclusion
• Index
• End User License Agreement