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

This book explores the extent to which Responsibility to Protect shifts our understanding of both the potential and practice of international law.

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 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.

These essays support the argument that strong and effective presidential leadership is the most important prerequisite for South Korea to sustain and project its influence abroad. That leadership should be attentive to the need for public consensus and should operate within established legislative mechanisms that ensure public accountability. The underlying structures sustaining South Korea’s foreign policy formation are generally sound; the bigger challenge is to manage domestic politics in ways that promote public confidence about the direction and accountability of presidential leadership in foreign policy.

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.