Responsibility to Protect: Research, bibliography, background. Supplementary volume to the Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty

This book presents an institutional perspective on realizing the responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.

This book studies regional approaches to the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) in Europe and West Africa. The work assesses how and to what extent the European Union (EU) and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) have internalised the norm, both generally, in institutions, policies, and programs and specifically, in crisis situations of R2P concern, such as the 2011 Libyan crisis and 2012 Malian crisis. It provides a historical analysis of how the two regional organisations have dealt with questions of sovereignty, security, and human rights since their founding, as well as an analysis of some of the European and West African roots of the R2P norm. This reflects the notion that global norms are often informed by local and regional practices and that this needs to be recognised in order to fully understand regional responses to alleged global norms. The book uses process tracing to trace the regional internalisation of R2P and has benefited from qualitative research interviews with EU- and ECOWAS-stakeholders. One of the key findings is that ECOWAS and West Africa have delivered a key contribution to the norm construction of R2P, a finding insufficiently recognised in the current literature. This book will be of much interest to students of the Responsibility to Protect, EU human rights and foreign policy, African politics, security studies, and International Relations in general.

'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 protection of civilians which has been at the forefront of international discourse during recent years is explored through harnessing perspective from international law and international relations. Presenting the realities of diplomacy and mandate implementation in academic discourse.

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.

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.