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.

"Protection in the Shadow of Empire Since the late 1950s, the United Nations and other international actors have developed and systematised a body of practices aimed at 'the maintenance of order' and 'the protection of life' in the decolonised world. These practices range from fact-finding and the provision of humanitarian assistance to peacekeeping, the management of refugee camps and territorial administration. As the UN and humanitarian organisations expanded and consolidated those practices, a new form of authority began to emerge. This book is an exploration of the ways in which those practices of governing and that form of authority have been represented. It focuses in particular upon a new basis for justifying and rationalising international rule that emerged at the beginning of the twenty-first century"--

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

"Never again!" the world has vowed time and again since the Holocaust. Yet genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other mass atrocity crimes continue to shock our consciences—from the killing fields of Cambodia to the machetes of Rwanda to the agony of Darfur. Gareth Evans has grappled with these issues firsthand. As Australian foreign minister, he was a key broker of the United Nations peace plan for Cambodia. As president of the International Crisis Group, he now works on the prevention and resolution of scores of conflicts and crises worldwide. The primary architect of and leading authority on the Responsibility to Protect ("R2P"), he shows here how this new international norm can once and for all prevent a return to the killing fields. The Responsibility to Protect captures a simple and powerful idea. The primary responsibility for protecting its own people from mass atrocity crimes lies with the state itself. State sovereignty implies responsibility, not a license to kill. But when a state is unwilling or unable to halt or avert such crimes, the wider international community then has a collective responsibility to take whatever action is necessary. R2P emphasizes preventive action above all. That includes assistance for states struggling to contain potential crises and for effective rebuilding after a crisis or conflict to tackle its underlying causes. R2P's primary tools are persuasion and support, not military or other coercion. But sometimes it is right to fight: faced with another Rwanda, the world cannot just stand by. R2P was unanimously adopted by the UN General Assembly at the 2005 World Summit. But many misunderstandings persist about its scope and limits. And much remains to be done to solidify political support and to build institutional capacity. Evans shows, compellingly, how big a break R2P represents from the past, and how, with its acceptance in principle and effective application in practice, the promise of "Never

In her book, 'International Authority and the Responsibility to Protect,' Anne Orford compellingly demonstrates how the doctrine of responsibility to protect can be seen as providing a normative foundation for international authority already exercised through 'pre-existing practices of protection' on the part of the international executive. She does so through a close historical analysis of practice on the part of the UN, and particularly the work of Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld. In doing so, she positions Hammarskjöld as the 'founding father' of international executive action, and treats the expansion of international authority justified by reference to protection largely as a result of the implementation of Hammarskjöld's vision for the development of international executive rule. Focusing on Hammarskjöld in this way provides the basis for an illuminating and coherent narrative of the development of the responsibility to protect concept. However, it also obscures questions of the social and institutional context within which Hammarskjöld's ideas took effect. Quite evidently, it was not Hammarskjöld alone, but a whole bureaucratic machinery which performed the 'protracted process' of consolidating international executive power by reference to the concept of protection. But this social history of the responsibility to protect is largely missing from Orford's narrative. As a result, Orford's account of the 'pre-existing...practices of protection,' which responsibility to protect emerged to justify, is only partial, and leaves critical questions - such as the nature of those exercising international authority - unanswered. In this piece I therefore argue that Orford's consideration of the political philosophy and intellectual history of the responsibility to protect needs to be supplemented by greater attention to its sociology, through an analysis of how practices of international executive action to 'protect life' developed through the institutional life - or 'culture' - of international bodies. Such an analysis not only offers a more complete picture of the consolidation of international executive authority based on protection, but also provides a basis for understanding how the responsibility to protect concept might affect the future practices of international institutions exercising executive power.

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.

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.