In 2011, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 1973, authorizing its member states to take measures to protect Libyan civilians from Muammar Gadhafi’s forces. In invoking the “responsibility to protect,” the resolution draws on the principle that sovereign states are responsible and accountable to the international community for the protection of their populations and that the international community can act to protect populations when national authorities fail to do so. The idea that sovereignty includes the responsibility to protect is often seen as a departure from the classic definition, but it actually has deep historical roots. In Sovereignty and the Responsibility to Protect, Luke Glanville argues that this responsibility extends back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and that states have since been accountable for this responsibility to God, the people, and the international community. Over time, the right to national self-governance came to take priority over the protection of individual liberties, but the noninterventionist understanding of sovereignty was only firmly established in the twentieth century, and it remained for only a few decades before it was challenged by renewed claims that sovereigns are responsible for protection. Glanville traces the relationship between sovereignty and responsibility from the early modern period to the present day, and offers a new history with profound implications for the present.

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

The responsibility to protect ('R2P') principle articulates the obligations of the international community to prevent conflict occurring, to intervene in conflicts, and to assist in rebuilding after conflicts. The doctrine is about protecting civilians in armed conflicts from four mass atrocity crimes: genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing. This book examines interventions in East Timor, Sri Lanka, Sudan and Kosovo. The chapters explore and question UN debates with respect to the doctrine both before and after its adoption in 2005; contrasting state attitudes to international military intervention; and what takes place after intervention. It also discusses the ability of the Security Council to access reliable information and credible and transparent processes to enable it to make a determination on the occurrence of atrocities in a Member State. Questioning whether there is a need to find a closer operational link between the responsibilities to prevent and react and a normative link between R2P and principles of international law, the contributions examine the effectiveness of the framework of R2P for international decision-making in response to mass atrocity crimes and ask how an international system to deal with threats and mass atrocities can be developed in the absence of a central authority. This book will be valuable to those interested in international law, human rights, and security, peace and conflict studies.

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 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.

After having been introduced by the Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) in 2001 and after its affirmation by the UN World Summit in 2005 the concept of R2P has found broad approval both by international law doctrine and practice. It is fair to say that international law thinking has been profoundly influenced by this new approach. Nonetheless, many questions in this regard are still open. In this volume international lawyers discuss a series of fundamental aspect of R2P: the historical dimension, the relationship between R2P and general international law and the dynamics surrounding this concept. In particular it will be examined in which direction this concept will probably evolve. Contributors are: Alex Bellamy, Enzo Cannizzaro, Martina Caroni, Thomas Cottier, Hans-Georg Dederer, Fernand de Varennes, Oliver Diggelmann, Caro Focarelli, Andrea Gattini, Hans-Joachim Heintze, Peter Hilpold, Karolina Januszewski, Stefan Kadelbach, Federico Lenzerini, Manfred Nowak, Karin Oellers-Frahm, Nadakavukren Scheffer, Peter-Tobias Stoll, and Lotta Viikari

The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle is the international community's major response to the problem of genocide and mass atrocities - a problem seen in Bosnia, Rwanda and more recently in Syria. This book argues that although it is far from perfect R2P offers the best chance we have of building an international community that works to prevent these crimes and protect vulnerable populations. To make this argument, the book sets out the logic of R2P and its key ambitions, examines some of the critiques of the principle and its implementation in situations such as Libya, and sets out ways of overcoming some of the practical problems associated with moving this principle from words into deeds.