The Origins and Evolution of Responsibility To Protect at The UN

659586
earch-article2016
IRE0010.1177/0047117816659586Cater and MaloneCater and Malone
Article
International Relations
2016, Vol. 30(3) 278–297
The origins and evolution © The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0047117816659586
at the UN ire.sagepub.com
Charles Cater
United Nations
David M Malone
United Nations University
Abstract
This article situates the emergence of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) concept, later accepted
by many as a principle, in the wider flow of events following on the end of the Cold War. Among
the hallmarks of change in the United Nations (UN) Security Council as of the early 1990s, in
stark contrast to the Council’s preoccupations during its first four decades of activity, was its
growing attention to humanitarian considerations relating to conflict, its new willingness to tackle
conflicts (mainly internal ones) it might have avoided earlier, and its willingness to experiment
with new approaches to resolving them. Just as worries over terrorism and the threat of weapons
of mass destruction were to become dominant themes in its work, the humanitarian imperative
also incrementally wove itself into the fabric of the Council’s decision-making. It is against this
wider backdrop and that of several spectacular UN failures to prevent genocide and other mass
humanitarian distress that UN Secretary-General (UNSG) Kofi Annan was impelled as of 1999 to
look beyond existing international law and practice for a new normative framework, that while
formally respecting the sovereignty of states nevertheless elevated humanitarian concerns and
action to the level of an international responsibility to prevent the worst outcomes. Today R2P
finds itself competing with other legal and diplomatic principles, but it remains a potent platform
for advocacy and, at times, for action by the UN.
Keywords
ICISS, international criminal justice, Responsibility to Protect, R2P, Security Council, World
Summit Outcome Document
Corresponding author:
Charles Cater, United Nations Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea., P.O. Box 67578-00200,
Nairobi, Kenya.
Emails: [email protected]
Downloaded from ire.sagepub.com at CORNELL UNIV on September 9, 2016

Cater and Malone 279
Introduction
The emergence of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is traced most often to the dilemma
faced by a range of international actors when a Russian veto threat in early 1999 barred
United Nations (UN) Security Council (UNSC) authorization of military action to pro-
tect civilians in Kosovo from increasingly frequent and serious attacks by Serb antago-
nists. North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries acted without Council
authorization by launching air strikes against Serb targets in Kosovo that were later wid-
ened to include the Serb capital, Belgrade. This brought about de facto autonomy of most
of Kosovo and international administration of its territory and people under the terms of
Security Council resolution (SCR) 1244 of June 1999. Following a series of UN difficul-
ties and failures in establishing and maintaining peace, some involving genocide, the
Kosovo episode caused UN Secretary-General (UNSG) Kofi Annan in September 1999
to question whether an international intervention unauthorized by the Council to prevent
genocide in Rwanda in 1994 would have been wrong. This set in motion a number of
initiatives and developments described below that led to the adoption at the World
Summit in 2005 of several carefully negotiated paragraphs accepting a responsibility to
take collective action in extreme circumstances, where the state involved cannot or will
not do so itself, to protect ‘populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and
crimes against humanity’. This responsibility was somewhat hedged in the negotiated
text and clearly required UNSC authorization to act. It was hard-fought and seemed
groundbreaking, as did subsequent acknowledgment by the Council of this new approach.
However, the roots of R2P extend further back, to the end of the Cold War and the
protection of the Kurds of Iraq in 1991, attempts to rescue Somalis from famine in 1992,
and other initiatives that by accretion eroded absolute conceptions of sovereignty and
demonstrated that the UNSC and the wider international community could, in the post–
Cold War era, innovate in addressing conflict and distress of various kinds, often over-
riding local actors claiming to uphold national sovereignty. And what seemed like the
high watermark of R2P implementation – the NATO intervention in Libya in 2011 – was
soon followed by overreach in implementing the limited authorization for use of force
granted by the Council. This led to growing distrust among key Council members, pro-
ducing a devastating deadlock involving internal and international actors over Syria,
where nobody has been protected since 2012, but where the occasional tactical alliance
among international antagonists has occurred, notably between the Russian Federation
and the United States over chemical weapons and their removal in 2013–2014.
The text proceeds in seven sections. The first charts the rise of humanitarian consid-
erations in the hierarchy of international preoccupations after the Cold War. The second
addresses the genocides in Rwanda and Srebrenica that served as the foundation for later
normative development of a principle that would have argued for the use of force to
prevent them. The third discusses the emergence of International Criminal Justice mech-
anisms as evidence of a shift in perceptions of mass crimes within the international com-
munity and highlights its connection with R2P. The fourth discusses the Kosovo crisis
– the trigger for a range of initiatives to reconcile national sovereignty with a duty to
intervene to protect civilian lives when threatened in large numbers. The fifth examines
UNSG Kofi Annan’s role in the emergence of the R2P principle. The sixth discusses

280 International Relations 30(3)
aspects of its adoption by the World Summit in 2005 and subsequent endorsement by the
UNSC. The seventh outlines some headwinds R2P has run into amidst recriminations in
the UNSC over Libya and Syria. In our conclusions, we argue that R2P is likely to con-
tinue featuring in international decision-making in the future, but not as the sole relevant
driver, rather one fated always to be in competition with other legal, political, and moral
considerations. Above all, relationships among the great powers will influence the nature
and frequency of its invocation and use by the UNSC.
A new broom in the Security Council

Normative development at the UN (and also shifts in UN practice, such as the introduc-
tion in the late 1940s of UN monitoring missions and in the mid-1950s of large-scale UN
peacekeeping) occurs in response to events and takes advantage of shifts in perception in
major capitals, particularly those of the Permanent Five members (P-5) of the UNSC.1
During the Cold War years, the UN was seriously constrained by the deep-rooted mutual
suspicion of Moscow and Washington and their respective allies. Nevertheless, the
UNSC was able to authorize the use of force in Korea in 1950 (in the absence of the
Soviet Delegation, then boycotting Council sessions). It expanded interpretation of the
UN Charter in the early 1960s to allow UN involvement in two internal conflicts through
UN peacekeeping with potential, and later on actual, international spillovers in the
Congo and Cyprus, with internal conflict becoming its bread and butter after the end of
the Cold War. And, in the wake of widespread decolonization and emancipation, it
authorized limited but mandatory sanctions on Rhodesia and on South Africa, amidst a
climate of revulsion with continuing racial discrimination there. The UN General
Assembly (UNGA) meanwhile adopted an expansive view of economic and social rights,
setting in motion normative development in the areas of economic development and
human rights.
The end of the Cold War changed a great deal for the UN. A decisive thaw occurred
within the UNSC in early 1987 as it wrestled with the murderous Iran–Iraq war, when it
was able to agree on a settlement plan after intensive work among the P-5, which was not
accepted by the parties to the conflict until 1988. Iran and Iraq then established peace
along their borders with minimal UN monitoring.2 A shift in Soviet priorities under new
President Mikhail Gorbachev from confrontation to cooperation with the Western pow-
ers, accompanied by Moscow’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, opened the door to the
settlement of several other enduring, if often frozen, disputes leading, for example, to the
independence of Namibia.3 These shifts, and also both the successes and failures of the
UN to promote and protect human rights and humanitarian norms, were critical forerun-
ners to the debates of the early years of this century on R2P.4
Humanitarian considerations played a minor role in the Council’s work on the Iran–
Iraq war, although they much preoccupied then UNSG Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, but
asserted themselves in the immediate aftermath of the UNSC-authorized military cam-
paign to expel Iraq from Kuwait in early 1991, when local populations in both the north
and south of Iraq rose up against its leader, Saddam Hussein. In spite of encouragement
by Washington to rebel, the Shi’a people of the South were left to their own devices and
suffered terrible reprisals by the Baghdad regime. Meanwhile, the Kurdish territories in

the north, which had suffered greatly during the Iran–Iraq war, not least from chemical
weapons attacks by their own government, attracted more sympathy internationally, par-
ticularly in France. Iran and Turkey sought Council action to prevent the flight of Kurdish
refugees toward their territories. In adopting resolution 688 on 5 April 2001, with three
votes against and two abstentions (including China), the UNSC, for the first time since
its actions against Rhodesia and South Africa, demanded improvement in the human
rights situation within Iraq as a contribution to peace and security. It also insisted on
international humanitarian access to those in need. Several days later, President Bush
announced the ambitious Operation Provide Comfort to provide relief within the Kurdish
districts, eventually supported by 20,000 troops from 13 nations. While none of this was
authorized in SCR 688, neither China nor Russia protested: the humanitarian need was
compelling, even though Iraq’s sovereignty was being curtailed.
A further humanitarian innovation by the UNSC, one not formally breaching Iraq’s
sovereignty, was its decision in 1995 under pressure from France (which had defected from
joint decision-making with the United Kingdom and the United States on Iraq, and joined
Russia and China as a critic of the humanitarian costs of the sweepings sanctions regime),
to create with sequestered Iraqi funds a UN program to provide vital foodstuffs and other
key commodities to the Iraqi population, which came to be known as ‘Oil for Food’. This
massive program was eventually discredited for two reasons: (1) it was distorted by a black
market in vital or popular consumer goods created and controlled by the Iraqi regime and
(2) it eventually came to light that several UN officials and a number of others, including
two of France’s top diplomats, had been corrupted by Saddam Hussein’s regime in order to
influence UN decision-making. Nevertheless, the launch and scale of Oil for Food signaled
that humanitarian concerns were now being addressed more seriously by the Council.5
In 1992, President Bush sought and received, in the absence of an effective local gov-
ernment, Council authorization to deploy to Somalia a large-scale military mission,
which involved international participation, in effect rescuing an ill-conceived UN peace-
keeping mission, to relieve a devastating famine. The intervention sucked the United
States and eventually the UN (by then back in Somalia in a peacekeeping role) into
extensive hostilities there in 1992 and 1993, culminating in dramatic loss of US life in
the ‘Black Hawk Down’ incident of October 1993 that led to US and eventual UN mili-
tary withdrawal from the country.6
Elsewhere, a breakthrough was achieved in 1991 that would bring peace to Cambodia
after many years of genocide and turmoil, with elections organized by the large UN
peacekeeping operation, which enjoyed considerable powers. One interesting feature of
the Cambodia case was the degree to which plans for the return and resettlement of refu-
gees provided a positive political dynamic for settling with the rump Khmer Rouge lead-
ership. In Central America, the interlocking civil wars of Nicaragua, El Salvador, and
Guatemala drew to a close, with the UN playing a particularly key role in El Salvador,
where it broke new ground by deploying hundreds of human rights observers to inhibit
human rights violations even before peacekeepers were introduced. In Haiti, after many
attempts to dislodge peacefully a military junta that in 1991 had overthrown the coun-
try’s elected president, the UNSC in 1993 backed into authorizing the use of force to
achieve the elected president’s return, thus, conferring on itself in this instance a democ-
racy protection role unimagined only years earlier.7

Rwanda and Srebrenica8

Nevertheless, just as it had in Somalia, so the UN would encounter serious reverses in
Rwanda and in Bosnia. The enthusiasm of the Clinton administration for intervention
was now dampened, as the UN discovered when the United States failed to land its own
peacekeepers in Haiti in October 1993 in the face of a noisy but small rump of Haitian
demonstrators in Port au Prince. In the face of a rapidly developing genocide (of which
the UN had had some warning, which it mishandled) in Rwanda, the UNSC’s instinct, in
the absence of any champion of a more robust approach, was to downsize the modestly
scaled UN peacekeeping operations (PKO) in Rwanda, prompted by the killing of sev-
eral Belgian peacekeepers who unsuccessfully sought to protect the country’s prime min-
ister. Those UN troops not yet evacuated from Rwanda, mainly a contingent from Ghana
bravely led by General Henry Anyidoho, and the UN’s commanding officer, General
Roméo Dallaire and his team in Kigali, performed heroically in saving many lives in the
Kigali stadium and elsewhere amidst the carnage. In New York the Council’s president
in April 2004, Colin Keating of New Zealand, drawing in part on information provided
by NGOs, as well as the Nigerian delegation led by Ibrahim Gambari, did a great deal to
highlight the reality on the ground, eventually shaming the Council into belated motion.
None of the P-5 emerged with honor, least of all, perhaps, France, with extensive knowl-
edge of, and connections in, the country and the United States, with extensive intelli-
gence capabilities.9 Their inaction seems to have been dictated at best by the absence of
compelling national interests in Rwanda, and at worst, possibly, by complicity with the
genocidal regime or at least unwarranted complacency toward it.
The UN’s involvement in the former Yugoslavia, initially one designed to reverse the
tide of refugees fleeing to neighboring countries, grew incrementally and somewhat cha-
otically to include the promise of protection to civilians compressed into several ‘safe
areas’ in the midst of Bosnian War zones. For these latter responsibilities, the UNSC only
authorized a limited number of additional troops that the UN’s Department of
Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) considered entirely inadequate for the task, and on
which it privately challenged the key troop-contributing countries. Displaying a ten-
dency to ‘expediency’ – as described by former UN Under-Secretary-General for Political
Affairs, Kieran Prendergast – the Council, driven by the United Kingdom and France,
simply settled on the number it thought could be mustered, not apparently considering
dropping or modifying its enthusiasm for ‘safe’ havens.10 Of these, Srebrenica was to
become the most infamous.
The UN’s approach to the former Yugoslavia was bedeviled by two important splits
among the P-5. France and the United Kingdom argued that a muscular form of classic
UN peacekeeping (to which some of the troop-contributing countries were hostile) could
muddle through the quagmire. The United States, which was ultimately proved right,
was increasingly convinced that only the application of significant force, including by air
power, would convince the aggressors to relent. And the Russian Federation, which had
a close relationship with Belgrade, frequently argued in favor of peaceful means of con-
flict resolution. Thus, considerable confusion undermined UN policy, allowing the com-
batants on the ground to game the odds against UN personnel. The incoherence of the
Council’s strategy contributed significantly to the tragedy at Srebrenica whose ‘safe

area’ ultimately went undefended by the UN and NATO, costing the lives in July 1995 of
thousands of men and boys (likely more than 8000). This conflict was one of the first in
which sexual violence against women was widely documented and publicized within the
UN, eventually leading to much greater focus within the Council on the specific role of
women both in conflict resolution and as victims of, at times, systematic use of sexual
violence as a tactic of intimidation and punishment.
International criminal justice

The spectacular killings in Rwanda and the extreme levels of violence in Bosnia pro-
duced one important systemic change. In 1993, with strong encouragement from the
United States, the UNSC created an International Criminal Tribunal to oversee the
indictment and prosecution of suspected perpetrators of genocide, crimes against human-
ity and war crimes in the former Yugoslavia. This initiative came in part over sheer
frustration at the ineffectiveness of the UN’s well-intended but underpowered measures
on the ground to protect Bosnians. The following year, after the Rwanda genocide, it
created another tribunal with a similar mandate.
The creation of these two tribunals inevitably led to questions about selective justice
directed only at conflicts in two countries, whereas mass crimes were occurring else-
where as well. In 1996, negotiations started on the establishment of a more universal
International Criminal Court (ICC), whose statute was agreed (in record time, by multi-
lateral treaty negotiating standards) in 1998, with the Court being established in 2002.
These events were pregnant with consequence, although it is too early to assess how
influential their decisions will prove. The tribunals have been criticized for working slowly,
and on too few cases, while the ICC has been tarred with trying, to date, only indictees from
Africa (see the article in this Special Issue by Benjamin Schiff). Nevertheless, most of the
principal perpetrators and suspected perpetrators of war crimes and genocide in the former
Yugoslavia from Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina have now been tried, as have
many of those associated with genocide in Rwanda. And, creditably, while many have been
convicted, most recently, on 24 March 2016, Radovan Karadzic, former president of the
Republika Srpska during the Bosnian War, others were acquitted. On the ICC, judgments
need to be more cautious: its cases have been more difficult, not all of its indictees appre-
hended, and its pace of work has been disappointingly slow, although its prosecutor since
2012, Fatou Bensouda, has proved both energetic and pragmatic.11
To telescope the extent of change in international relations that these institutional
innovations have brought about, it is now clear that in specific cases, serving heads of
government can be internationally indicted and very senior officials tried and convicted
of crimes committed within the confines of their own countries. The extent to which
these developments undermine absolute conceptions of sovereignty should not be
underestimated.
Such new institutions create new dynamics in international relations. While the United
States supported, indeed drove, the creation of the two tribunals, President Clinton proved
more hesitant about the ICC, wishing to ensure that it would not side-swipe American citi-
zens operating internationally, notably American peacekeepers for the UN and other
organizations. He signed the statute only on his very last day in office. And his successor,

George W. Bush, in a move hitherto unknown to the law of treaties, ‘unsigned’ the statute
a few months later, asserting American sovereignty over its citizens. However, faced with
a number of unattractive options relative to Sudan’s aggression against its own province
of Darfur which was costing many civilian lives, after much hesitation, this same Bush
Administration in 2005 acquiesced in the UNSC referring this case to the ICC, as did
China, a key economic partner of Khartoum. The formal US positioning vis-à-vis the
Court is now little different than that of countries such as China and Russia (the latter of
which signed, under President Yeltsin, but has not since ratified its statute).12 That said,
the United States is primarily worried about avoiding ICC jurisdiction over its own citi-
zens (and also about the possibility of Court proceedings relating to Israel).
The major normative innovations of the last two decades relating to international
criminal justice undoubtedly contributed to the emergence of R2P by providing momen-
tum for the relevance, indeed centrality, of humanitarian and human rights considera-
tions in international relations at the time. Because R2P deals with war crimes, ethnic
cleansing, crimes against humanity, and the use of force at times, as well as with the
protection of civilians, the tendency of some R2P proponents and some within the UN
community to conflate R2P simplistically with only the protection of civilians is mis-
guided and generates suspicion of both proponents and the principle among those more
reserved about R2P.
Kosovo
Those within the UN Secretariat dealing the most with Rwanda, including then Under-
Secretary-General for PKO Kofi Annan and Iqbal Riza, his deputy, were deeply scarred by
the experience. For some, these experiences increased their resolve to tackle the future
challenges more decisively.13 Annan writes in his biography: ‘I took with me, above all, the
lessons of Bosnia and Rwanda. Evil in civil war zones occurs due to the will of the conflict
protagonists, which must be rounded upon, confronted and stopped – and through force if
necessary’.14 When he perceived the emergence in Kosovo in 1998 of a ‘Bosnia in slow
motion’ all over again, Annan, by now UNSG, spoke out in both 1998 and early 1999 in
favor of concerted international action to avert a repeat of avoidable civilian casualties.15
But opinion within the P-5 was split and emotions raw after major disagreements over
Kosovo in late 1998. Russia remained protective of Belgrade (although it doubtless sought
to rein in its reckless friend). And in the face of a split between Russia and the three
Western Permanent Members, China could hardly be expected to side with the latter.
While Moscow was successful in withholding Council authorization for NATO action
against Belgrade’s forces in Kosovo and beyond, the victory proved pyrrhic, as NATO
acted anyway. Furthermore, an ill-conceived decision by Moscow to force a vote on its
Council draft resolution condemning NATO 2 days after its air campaign had started was
voted down by 12 votes against 3 on 26 March 1999.
But, while a great deal of sympathy was evident at the UN for the plight of Kosovar
civilians under attack by Serb-backed forces, not least among Muslim countries, attach-
ment to the sovereignty of states remained a bedrock principle for most UN member states.
And many of Annan’s advisors counseled prudence rather than a stance on intervention for
humanitarian purposes that implied support for NATO’s action.

Nader Mousavizadeh, then an adviser and speechwriter in the UNSG’s office and
later the co-author of Annan’s memoirs, believes that Annan nevertheless was convinced
new policy approaches were required, irrespective of the offense this might cause to
states and colleagues holding more restrictive views on the limits to intervention.16 The
notion of ‘norm entrepreneurship’ was not yet on his mind.17 Rather, Annan was grap-
pling with apparently irreconcilable principles stemming from law relating to sover-
eignty and the humanitarian imperative.
Annan’s role in driving the development of R2P

Kofi Annan’s role in the emergence of R2P was decisive, although, at times, occluded
from view.18 Principal episodes include his speech to the opening of the UNGA on 20
September 1999, concluding that the international community should welcome the ‘devel-
oping norm in favor of intervention to protect civilians from wholesale slaughter’.19 He
advanced a counterfactual proposition that confounded and enraged delegates holding
traditional views of state sovereignty:
To those for whom the greatest threat to the future of international order is the use of force in
the absence of a Security Council mandate, one might ask, not in the context of Kosovo but in
the context of Rwanda, if, in those dark days and hours leading up to the genocide, a coalition
of States had been prepared to act in defence of the Tutsi population, should such a coalition
have stood aside and allowed the horror to unfold?20
The initial reaction to Annan’s speech was overwhelmingly negative among the mem-
bers of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).21 But Annan, overriding the advice of sev-
eral key aides, remained convinced of his position.
As was often his habit, he sought outside help. Accepting that debate on these issues
within UN circles had reached an impasse, he requested the International Peace Academy
to gather a small number of individuals who might help him to think through whether
clear criteria to trigger intervention could be devised. This occurred on 8 and 9 March
2000, bringing together several leading international law and politics scholars and some
others.22 The meeting’s report suggested that ‘the way forward involves changing the
terms of the debate and carrying it to the public, thereby changing the environment in
which decisions are made’.23 In his subsequent report, We the Peoples, published in April
2000, Annan yielded little ground to critics on the issue:
Surely no legal principle – not even sovereignty – can ever shield crimes against humanity.
Where such crimes occur and peaceful attempts to halt them have been exhausted, the Security
Council has a moral duty to act on behalf of the international community.24
Multi-tiered international debate leads to UN endorsement

of R2P25
Later in 2000 Prime Minister Jean Chretien of Canada announced the creation of the
International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS).26 Foreign

Minister Lloyd Axworthy stated that Canada’s goal for ICISS was to ‘diffuse the anxiety
that surrounds the issues of intervention and sovereignty by building a similar bridge
between our current notions of these concepts’.27
In December 2001, the ICISS report, Responsibility to Protect was launched.28 Its
core assertion was that sovereignty implies that the state has primary responsibility for
the protection of civilians, but that the principle of non-intervention yields to the interna-
tional R2P if the state is unwilling or unable to stop serious harm to its population. The
R2P also tackled the most controversial aspect of contemporary debate by establishing
inter alia criteria for military intervention and precautionary principles.29 ICISS affirmed
the centrality of the UNSC, suggesting that only when the Council fails to act could the
matter be considered by the General Assembly under the ‘Uniting for Peace’ formula or
by regional organizations under Chapter VIII of the UN Charter (a red flag to several
permanent members of the Council).
The most significant contribution of the ICISS report was, as Annan and Canada had
hoped, to reframe the debate. In the words of ICISS co-chair Gareth Evans:
We sought to turn the whole weary – and increasingly ugly – debate about ‘the right to intervene’
on its head and re-characterize it not as an argument about the ‘right’ of states to do anything
but rather about their ‘responsibility’ – in this case, to protect people at grave risk.30
ICISS owed an intellectual debt to earlier work on internally displaced persons of

Francis Deng and others, who had previously formulated the concept ‘sovereignty as
responsibility’ in the mid-1990s.31 As conceptualized by Deng and his colleagues, ‘sov-
ereignty as responsibility’ encompassed what would eventually become known as the
first two pillars of the R2P – the state’s obligations to the safety of its own citizens, and
the need for capacity-building assistance to states in order that this might be achieved.
Deng suggests the focus of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ on these first two pillars of
R2P, rather than the third (i.e. action by external actors), explains its enduring appeal,
particularly among African diplomats and within the wider diplomatic community.32
When the ICISS report was discussed at the annual retreat of the UNSC in May 2002,
the P-5 expressed concerns with the text. In particular, the United States objected to any
criteria that would require it to engage militarily in situations where it lacked national
interests or constrains its latitude to decide on when and where to use force.33 Washington
seems to have feared being compelled to use force as much as it did being barred from
doing so. By then, the dramatic events of 9/11 had occurred in New York and Washington,
and interest in Kosovo and protection of civilians had been somewhat eclipsed by the
fight against terrorism that ensued in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Less than a year later, in February and March 2003, two events transpired that would
have an influence on subsequent developments: the onset of war in Darfur and the joint
US–UK invasion of Iraq without UNSC authorization. The former situation urgently
illustrated the difficult challenges of operationalizing preventive action, while the latter
reinforced existing concerns among member states regarding a softening of international
rules governing the use of force.
On 23 September 2003, largely in reaction to the controversy surrounding the inter-
vention in Iraq, Annan announced the formation of what became known as the

High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change (HLP), of which Gareth Evans was
a member.34 The HLP’s influential report of December 2004 states:
We endorse the emerging norm that there is a collective international responsibility to protect,
exercisable by the Security Council authorizing military intervention as a last resort, in the
event of genocide and other large-scale killing, ethnic cleansing or serious violations of
international humanitarian law which sovereign Governments have proved powerless or
unwilling to prevent.35
In the run-up to the 2005 UN Summit, Annan urged heads of state and government to
‘Embrace the “responsibility to protect” as a basis for collective action’ when ‘the
Security Council may out of necessity decide to take action under the Charter, including
enforcement action, if so required’.36
Many developing countries still disliked the R2P concept, not least because the United
States and United Kingdom had resorted to humanitarian arguments in attempts to justify
their ill-judged plan to invade Iraq in 2003. But the ground had shifted somewhat because
the ICISS and HLP processes involved significant developing world participation. And,
importantly, the constitutive act of the new African Union (AU), launched in 2002,
included a clause asserting ‘The right of the Union to intervene in a Member State pursu-
ant to a decision of the Assembly in respect of grave circumstances, namely: war crimes,
genocide and crimes against humanity’.37 In the run-up to and at the UN Summit of
September 2005, the Canadian government lobbied at the highest levels, including in
Moscow and New Delhi. In 2004, Prime Minister Paul Martin had asserted reassuringly,
‘The responsibility to protect is not a license for intervention; it is an international guar-
antor of international accountability’.38 Gradually, opponents and potential opponents
were mollified.
On 16 September 2005, the UNGA adopted the World Summit Outcome document
without a vote. This long resolution includes three brief paragraphs (138–140) in a sec-
tion titled, ‘Responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic
cleansing and crimes against humanity’. Paragraph 138 notes:
Each individual State has the responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war
crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. This responsibility entails the prevention
of such crimes, including their incitement, through appropriate and necessary means. We accept
that responsibility and will act in accordance with it.39
Paragraph 138 also suggests the ‘international community should, as appropriate,

encourage and help states to exercise this responsibility’. Paragraph 139 concerns the
responsibility of ‘the international community, through the United Nations’ to protect
populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity.
In a major breakthrough for the UN, the core part of the text states:
… we are prepared to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the
Security Council, in accordance with the Charter, including Chapter VII, on a case-by-case
basis and in cooperation with relevant regional organizations as appropriate, should peaceful

means be inadequate and national authorities manifestly fail to protect their populations from
genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.40
The UNSC explicitly reaffirmed the Summit’s paragraphs 138 and 139 on R2P in
resolution 1674 of 28 April 2006, making them, formally at least, unexceptional at the
level of both the UNGA and the Council.
From the outset R2P was a somewhat sensitive topic at the UN and became actively
controversial after it was invoked to secure international military action to protect civil-
ians in Libya in 2011. Considerable debate within UN circles has occurred over the years
on how it can best be described. The Secretary-General, cautiously, has confined himself
to referring to it as a ‘concept’.41 The current Special Advisor of the Secretary-General for
R2P, Jennifer Welsh, and a growing number of member states have, in recent years,
described it as a ‘principle’, as we do here.42 Her predecessor, Ed Luck, who served in the
position from 2007 to 2012, teases out some of the definitional complexities of the term:
We were careful at the UN not to call it a ‘norm’, given that in a UN context norms are supposed
to have a binding legal quality. Outside, including in academic circles, R2P is increasingly
referred to as a norm, as in standard for behavior. ‘Emerging norm’ is also widely used, but that
implies – for the UN at least – that it is on the way to gaining a binding legal quality.43
Headwinds
Over the subsequent decade, a high degree of consensus emerged on many aspects of the
doctrine, as the UNSG’s Special Adviser, Jennifer Welsh, has recently explained.44
References to the doctrine became increasingly normal: by late 2015, the UNSC had
adopted more than 30 resolutions and six presidential statements drawing on the R2P.
The General Assembly has referred to the principle, held annual informal interactive
debates, and one formal debate. The Human Rights Council routinely refers to the con-
cept, including in country-specific situations. And both the AU and European Union
have supported the term.45
All of this suggested growing acceptance of the principle as a guide to states’ and
international organizations’ conduct, particularly on issues relating to the use of capac-
ity-building and diplomatic means to prevent, identify, and address R2P crimes. Yet,
consensus proved most elusive in the hardest cases – where the doctrine allows for the
use of coercive tools by the international community. Contestation over the applicability
of R2P in these cases seemed at times to imperil the legitimacy of the principle – yet, has
also, arguably, led to its contours being increasingly well defined.
The efforts by the UN and the AU to address the Darfur crisis largely failed to bring
about lasting improvements. They did, however, stem much of the killing on the ground
for a number of years, before being displaced in international policy circles by the inde-
pendence of South Sudan in 2011, and subsequently the new country’s sad eruption in
late 2013 into murderous civil conflict amidst political and inter-tribal arguments. The
fighting, taking countless civilians hostage, a large number of them protected by UN
peacekeepers, yielded to a seemingly tenuous peace agreement championed by African

neighbors in 2015, and the return to the capital, Juba, of rebel Vice-President Riek
Machar in April 2016. In July 2016, fighting broke out once again in the capital. Likewise,
the long civil war in Sri Lanka, opposing Tamil rebels to the central government drawing
its strength from the country’s Sinhalese majority, came to a horrendous climax in May
2009. During the final months of fighting, particularly its climax, tens of thousands of
civilians and rebel fighters were killed, many of them during the final hours of combat in
which large numbers of civilians had been taken hostage by both the rebel leadership and
the government victors. Two UN reports, including a searing one from an internal review
panel, made clear that the organization had failed miserably in its responsibility both to
warn of impending slaughter and to protect the civilians at stake, so many of whom died.
This led on to UNSG Ban Ki-Moon issuing a new UN ‘Human Rights Up Front’ policy,
but even this effort did not convince critics who noted that it failed to promise support
for UN officials advocating protective action in the face of hostile local governments.46
The Sri Lanka case did, however, highlight one difficulty in the application of the R2P
principle: disagreement over whether the trigger threshold was met. Even with 150,000
civilians penned in by military forces, some of the original proponents disagreed over the
basic question of the doctrine’s applicability.47
Cyclone Nargis, which devastated Myanmar in early May 2008, offers interesting
lessons on how forcible humanitarian intervention can be avoided. On the day following
landfall of the cyclone, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, long a humanitarian
campaigner, called for R2P to be applied to this natural disaster situation in a way that
implied the use of force, helping to trigger a highly defensive stance by the Myanmar
military government, initially severely limiting the types of international assistance that
would be allowed. In Asia, where national sovereignty is particularly prized by all states,
the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) proved helpful, arguing to
Yangon’s representatives that the provision and acceptance of urgently needed humani-
tarian assistance should have nothing to do with considerations of sovereignty or pro-
voke discussion of use of force. The Myanmar regime yielded much more easily to the
imprecations of valued ASEAN partners than it could have to perceived threats from
former colonial powers. This case served as a warning that R2P should not be loosely
invoked.48 Efforts by Russia to invoke R2P as a basis for military action in South Ossetia
were similarly contested, as Charles Ziegler notes in his article. The result, however, was
arguably a clarification of the scope of the norm around what Jennifer Welsh has
described as a ‘narrow but deep’ approach.49
Nevertheless, the Council has since then continued to at times invoke R2P or its core
elements, including in Côte D’Ivoire.50 This was the case both in imposing sanctions on
some of the local political and security actors in the country in 2010 and again when it
authorized the use of force, ultimately used to bring about the arrest – and subsequent
indictment by the ICC – of the former President Laurent Gbagbo, who is currently on
trial in The Hague.51
And in 2011, a cause arose which aroused great indignation in the West – Libyan
President Muammar Ghaddafi’s threat to exterminate inhabitants of the city of Benghazi,
who had risen up against his regime.52 Albeit with misgivings and five abstentions
(Russia, China, Brazil, India and, most surprisingly, Germany), the Council on 17 March
of that year, in its resolution 1973, ‘expressing its determination to ensure the protection

of civilians and civilian populated areas and the rapid and unimpeded passage of humani-
tarian assistance and the safety of humanitarian personnel’, authorized all necessary
measures – excluding an occupation force – to protect civilians in Libya and enforce an
earlier adopted arms embargo, imposed a no-fly zone and strengthened the existing sanc-
tions regime. Several countries, driven primarily by France and the United Kingdom, had
volunteered to lead military action that was carried out under the banner of NATO, with
Washington playing a critical role where specialized capacities were required.
Events on the ground proved fast-moving, but after reversing the balance of power
around Benghazi, NATO air strikes, becoming ever more controversial, nevertheless,
continued throughout the summer, even after the Ghaddafi regime was routed and on the
run well beyond the capital, Tripoli. Indeed, it was a French aircraft that immobilized a
convoy in which Ghaddafi was traveling on 20 October 2011, causing him to flee on foot
and to hide in a culvert from which he was dragged and killed by Libyan citizens. This
development deeply shocked those who were hesitant about NATO’s intervention and
led to the lifting of the authorization for the use of force in Libya a week later (SCR 2016
of 27 October 2011) amidst recriminations in the Council about mandate overreach by
the NATO countries fulfilling the Council’s protection mandate. Subsequent comments
by President Obama, critical of the intervention and of failure of France and Britain to
follow through in Libya after the military operations ceased, reflect considerable dismay
at the chaos that ensued in Libya after 2011.53
Meanwhile, the Council’s mostly passive approach to the travails of Yemen, particu-
larly with respect to air strikes by Saudi Arabia within the country since 2015, which
have claimed many lives, suggests that UNSC enthusiasm to discharge its responsibility
to protect against the backdrop of complex local and regional dynamics can erode.
Mistrust and implicit criticism of the Libya intervention was also clear in early
November 2011, when Brazil, then a member of the UNSC, presented ideas that could
be seen as either a complement or a rebuke to R2P under the banner ‘Responsibility
While Protecting’, discussed at greater length by Oliver Stuenkel in this Special Issue.54
It aimed at more serious thought and planning for humanitarian interventions in the
future, also subordinating the humanitarian objectives, purported or real, of potential
intervenors to political considerations, while urging careful examination of the possible
negative as well as positive consequences of intervention before proceeding. While this
initiative on one level accepts that military intervention driven by humanitarian goals is
likely to recur, it argues for a more sober approach. The ensuing debate was welcomed
by many countries at the UN and lingers in the backdrop of discussions on Syria.
When internal disturbances in 2011 turned into full-fledged civil war in Syria in 2012,
much of the Council believed that external intervention should not be contemplated,
beyond combatting terrorist forces there. Interestingly, however, the Council has – appar-
ently quite deliberately – avoided invocation of R2P in this context, despite the self-
evident presence of war crimes and other potential triggers. That said, the humanitarian
imperative has found expression time and again in UNSC resolutions on Syria, and in a
little-noticed shift in its theretofore firm position, in SCR 2165 of 24 June 2014, Russia
quietly dropped its insistence that all access by foreign actors wishing to provide assis-
tance within Syria be approved first by the Damascus regime. But clashing geostrategic
interests and assessments of the situation in Syria, the complexities of fighting heavily

armed terrorist movements such as the Islamic State controlling significant civilian pop-
ulations and different levels of enthusiasm for military intervention on the ground in
Moscow and Washington have demonstrated that when several of the great powers are at
odds, there will be little appetite to resort to R2P as a driver of UNSC decision-making.
At the time of writing, the outlook for Syria (and Iraq, which today suffers from some,
but not all of the same centrifugal national and international dynamics as Syria) is
uncertain.
Conclusion
In a fine essay, Ramesh Thakur argues that when and how force can be used in humani-
tarian intervention ‘lies at the intersection of law, politics and norms’.55 Our own lines
above have attempted to illustrate how contested this intersection can be and is likely to
remain.
It would be a travesty to believe that only Western countries and right-thinking ones
in agreement with them elsewhere uphold humanitarian values – and indeed the principle
of the R2P. Empirical evidence suggests otherwise, pointing to growing reliance by non-
Western powers on the norm.56 Rather, the weight given to these values in balance with
other considerations will vary significantly from capital to capital depending on the
issues at play. It would also be wrong to believe that a new bloc within the UNSC now
exists to frustrate the West’s agenda. China did not join Russia in a key vote, based in part
on an invocation of R2P, on Georgia in June 2009 and likewise parted company with
Moscow in voting on the latter’s incorporation of Crimea into the Russian Federation in
2014. But, it is true that there is considerable anxiety among many states at the UN of
what Western humanitarian agendas may conceal, and that both Russia and China, in
powerful blocking positions in the Council, share these concerns. Meanwhile, as
President Obama’s recent remarks on Libya suggest, appetite in the West for forcible
humanitarian intervention, with much of Europe affected by refugee flows from Syria,
Iraq, and Afghanistan (each the theatre of Western intervention of varying sorts in the
past 15 years), is muted. Thus, while R2P remains a useful principle in the UNSC’s tool-
box, its use will continue to depend very much on relationships among the major powers
and their analysis of complex situations on the ground, in which some of them may have
greater stakes than others, as the Russian Federation clearly does in Syria.
The main challenge to the Council’s effectiveness and its ability to protect civilian
lives today arises within this body and others from failures of communication, dialogue,
and willingness to compromise in favor of a greater good. And for these, the West shares
some responsibility, notably due to its feckless (if initially well-intentioned) approach to
Libya in 2011 and ensuing years. The Syrian population has paid a heavy price for the
distrust generated, and recent developments affecting Syrian refugees attempting to find
asylum in Europe come as a further blow to the morale of this population. But, it would
be foolish to equate Libya with Syria – the circumstances of the two countries were quite
different in the period 2011–2012 and are even more so today, if that is conceivable, and
consequently equally foolish to extrapolate directly from UNSC decision-making over
Libya to Council decisions, or lack thereof, on Syria.

Another challenge, equally serious but less obvious, is the implementation capacity of
UN and other multilateral actors when faced with complex, demanding mandates, issued
by a Council far from the realities of the field, seeking to cope with human and material
resources ill-suited to the considerable demands placed on them. As the lines above sug-
gest, there have been frequent Council calls for international forces on the ground to
protect civilians, so disagreement over norms is hardly a paralyzing factor in the Council.
But lack of implementation capacity on the ground sometimes is. That said, innovations
and breakthroughs in practice by the UN, including the use of early warning and assess-
ment tools to prevent mass atrocities and genocide, such as unmanned aerial vehicles
(drones) deployed in the Congo, the measures deployed in relation to the Kenyan elec-
tions in 2007–2008, as well as a helpful role for the Special Adviser on the Prevention of
Genocide in preventing ethnic violence from escalating in Kyrgyzstan in 2010, all sug-
gest that the UN is constantly learning on the job, while taking on new and daunting
challenges. Perhaps most impressive, in terms of R2P implementation, was the decision
by the UN’s peacekeeping force in South Sudan in 2014 to open its gates to floods of
civilians internally displaced and threatened by the civil war. The Force Intervention
Brigade in the Congo, created in 2013, was effective in its first effort to date to curtail
violent troublemakers wreaking havoc for local populations, but a lack of appetite for a
repeat engagement seems clear.
Commenting on uneven application of coercive measures broadly under R2P, Jennifer
Welsh writes:
by acknowledging that the Council would act (as it always does) on a ‘case by case basis’,
[member states] accepted [the] inevitability of a certain degree of selectivity. But the upside of
placing RtoP firmly within the parameters of the Charter – and distinguishing it from
humanitarian intervention – was seen as more important.57
This strikes us as precisely right.

Admirable principles of international law and diplomacy do not always mutually rein-
force each other. Indeed, as in constitutional law, they often overlap uncomfortably or
clash outright, keeping courts, decision-makers, academics, and pundits busy.58 But, this
fact in no way makes them irrelevant or redundant. R2P has established itself as an
important principle in international relations, but as with all other principles, it vies for
primacy in any given situation with competing imperatives, values, and priorities.
Sometimes its champions will ensure it prevails over absolute conceptions of sover-
eignty, but on other occasions, sovereignty will win out. For single-issue campaigners
and champions of the principle within the UN, its occasional eclipse is too quickly inter-
preted as a mortal blow.
It has now fully joined the body of normative material shaping key decisions on
humanitarian action, protection of civilians, international intervention, defense of sover-
eignty, and at times even war and peace. The story of its emergence and adoption sheds
great credit on those involved in developing the concept, advocating for it, and engaging
in strategies that eventually, and somewhat improbably, saw it adopted by the 2005 UN
Summit and endorsed by the UNSC in 2006 – no small set of achievements.

Acknowledgements
The authors are very grateful to Ramesh Thakur, Edward Mortimer, Nader Mousavizadeh, and
Kieran Prendergast for sharing with us their recollections and perceptions of developments out-
lined in middle sections of this article. We would also like to thank Sebastian von Einsiedel, James
Cockayne, Louise Bosetti, Nancy Roberts, and Paul Romita for their helpful comments. We are
grateful to Jennifer Welsh for responding so generously to our inquiries. And this Journal’s peer
reviewers were also highly perceptive and their observations acute. Finally, our appreciation to
Sumit Ganguly and Charles Ziegler for organizing this Special Issue and to the participants of the
May 2015 meeting for their useful feedback on an earlier draft of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Notes
1. There is no better source on the ins and outs of Council decision-making and practice that suc-
cessive editions of The Procedure of the Security Council (Oxford: Oxford University Press),
most of them associated with Sam Daws. The most recent, and most comprehensive, (fourth)
edition, authored by Loraine Sievers and Sam Daws, appeared in 2014.
2. On the Council’s breakthrough role with respect to the Iran–Iraq war, impelled by the new
Soviet outlook, see Cameron Hume, The United Nations, Iran and Iraq: How Peacemaking
Changed (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1994).
3. A recent review essay by Joost Hilterman (‘Chemical Wonders’, London Review of Books
38(3), 2016, pp. 3–6) helpfully reminds us that significant development of international strat-
egy on international security problems, particularly in or relating to the Middle East, nearly
always result from a shift in thinking of one of the great powers, which can induce new think-
ing by others.
4. On the origins of R2P, see Luke Glanville, Sovereignty and the Responsibility to Protect:
A New History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013); and Anne Orford,
International Authority and the Responsibility to Protect (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2011).
5. See David M. Malone, The International Struggle over Iraq: Politics in the UN
Security Council, 1980–2005 (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 84–
113, 114–51.
6. See John Hirsch, ‘Somalia’, in Sebastian von Einsiedel, David M. Malone and Bruno Stagno
Ugarte (eds) The UN Security Council in the 21st Century (Boulder, CO; London: Lynne
Rienner, 2015), pp. 595–600.
7. An excellent book on the conflicts of this era and the roles of the United Nations (UN) in
seeking to resolve them, including also theoretical debates relevant thereto, is Michael W.
Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis, Making War & Building Peace (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2006). Another useful book addressing conflict and peacebuilding in
the 1990s and 2000s, one of an excellent series bringing together these three editors, is
Chester A. Crocker, Fen Osler Hampson and Pamela Aall (eds) Leashing the Dogs of War:
Conflict Management in a Divided World (Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace Press,
2007).
8. The paragraphs of this section are informed by several publications, but particularly by
Kofi Annan with Nader Mousavizadeh, Interventions: A Life in War and Peace (New York:

Penguin, 2012) and James Traub’s somewhat more critical The Best Intentions: Kofi Annan
and the UN in the Era of American World Power (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2006), the title giving away the plot. Also useful was Frederic Eckhard, Kofi Annan: A
Spokesperson’s Memoir (New York: Ruder Finn Press, 2009).
9. Colin Keating, ‘Rwanda: An Insider’s Account’, in David M. Malone (ed.) The UN Security
Council: From Cold War to 21st Century (Boulder, CO; London: Lynne Rienner, 2004), pp.
506–7.
10. On Prendergast, see Malone, The International Struggle over Iraq, p. 285.
11. Worth mentioning here is the Special Court for Sierra Leone, set up further to Security
Council resolution (SCR) 1315 of August 10, 2000, and established in 2002 jointly by Sierra
Leone and the UN, with proceedings completed today against over 20 people, tried and, in
2012, convicted former President Charles Taylor of Liberia for:
acts of terrorism; murder; violence to life, health or physical well being of persons; rape;
sexual slavery; outrages upon personal dignity; other inhumane acts, a crime against
humanity; conscripting or enlisting children under the age of 15 years into the armed forces;
enslavement; and pillage.
He is currently serving a term of 50 years in a UK prison.

12. SC/8351 of 31 March 2005. See Adam Roberts and Richard Guelff, Documents on the
Laws of War, 3rd ed. (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 20–35,
482–3, 567–72, 615–21, 670–1, 667–97. For a more recent snapshot, see Eran Sthoeger,
‘International Courts and Tribunals’, in von Einsiedel et al., The UN Security Council in
the 21st Century, pp. 507–28. An excellent source for further updates on decisions of the
International Criminal Court (ICC) and the tribunals (today, as of early 2016, winding
down their dockets) is the website of the International Center for Transitional Justice,
available at: www.ictj.org.
13. As UN Secretary-General (UNSG), Annan had commissioned independent reports on the fall
of Srebrenica and on the Rwanda genocide. These separate reports, published in November
and December 1999, respectively, were to confirm that the UN and members states could
have done a great deal more to forestall and perhaps limit the scope of both catastrophes.
Annan was named among those sharing responsibility for the UN’s failures, something he had
apparently long internalized but that likely reinforced his determination to struggle toward a
new set of principles that could avoid the worst in the future. See A/54/549, 15 November
1999; and S/1999/1257, 16 December 1999.
14. Annan with Mousavizadeh, Interventions, pp. 78–9.
15. http://www.nato.int/docu/speech/1999/s990128a.htm ;UN Press Release SG/SM/6949 and
HR/CN/898, 7 April 1999; and UN Press Release SG/SM/6997, 18 May 1999.
16. Interview with Nader Mousavizadeh, 30 September 2014.
17. Ian Johnstone, ‘The Secretary-General as Norm Entrepreneur’, in Simon Chesterman (ed.)
Secretary or General? The UN Secretary-General in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007), pp. 123-138.
18. See Charles Cater and David M. Malone, ‘The Genesis of R2P: Kofi Annan’s
Intervention Dilemma’, in Alex Bellamy and Tim Dunne (eds) The Oxford Handbook
of the Responsibility to Protect (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2016),
pp. 114–29, forthcoming.
19. A/54/PV.4, 20 September 1999.
20. A/54/PV.4, 20 September 1999.
21. James Traub, The Best Intentions, pp. 112–15.

22. The co-authors of this article, Charles Cater and David M. Malone, served as rapporteur and
chair, respectively, of this meeting.
23. The report of the meeting, closely held for a time, is now merely of historical interest as a
way-station en route to R2P. It can be obtained by requesting it from [email protected] or
[email protected].
24. Kofi Annan, We the Peoples: The Role of the United Nations in the 21st Century (New York:
United Nations, 2000), p. 48.
25. Some of the matters discussed below are outlined at greater length in the Oxford Handbook of
the Responsibility to Protect chapter by Cater and Malone referred to in note 16 above.
26. A/55/PV.6, 7 September 2000.
27. A/55/PV.15, 14 September 2000. A useful volume on international commissions, including
an excellent chapter on R2P and assessing the International Commission on Intervention
and State Sovereignty (ICISS) report (pp. 198–220) by Jennifer Welsh, Carolin J.
Thielking and S. Neil MacFarlane is Ramesh Thakur, Andrew F. Cooper and John English
(eds) International Commissions and the Power of Ideas (Tokyo, Japan: United Nations
28. Responsibility to Protect: Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State
Sovereignty (Ottawa, ON, Canada: International Development Research Centre). See also
Simon Chesterman, ‘Responsibility to Protect’ Discussed at New York Seminar (New York:
International Peace Academy, 2002).
29. International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, XII–XIII. An exception-
ally useful volume still, over a decade after its publication, bringing together leading legal
minds and also thoughtful political scientists, is J.L. Holzgrefe and Robert O. Keohane (eds)
Humanitarian Intervention: Ethical Legal and Political Dilemmas (Cambridge: Cambridge
30. Gareth Evans, The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and For All
(Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2008), pp. 39–40.
31. Francis Deng, Sadikiel Kimaro, Terrence Lyons, et al., Sovereignty as Responsibility: Conflict
Management in Africa (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1996).
32. Deng interview with authors, New York, 15 October 2015.
33. Jennifer M. Welsh, ‘Conclusion: Humanitarian Intervention after 11 September’, in Jennifer
M. Welsh (ed.) Humanitarian Intervention and International Relations (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004), p. 180.
34. A/58/PV.7, 23 September 2003.
35. High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, A More Secure World: Our Shared
Responsibility (New York: United Nations, 2004), p. 66. This paragraph did not slip in with-
out contention among panel members. Chinese concerns were sharp and some members of
the Commission doubted the ‘legitimacy’ of ideas developed by a Commission of the ICISS
type. Nevertheless, none of the Panel members resiled publicly from the text.
36. A/59/2005, 21 March 2005, Annex 7(b).
37. The Constitutive Act of the African Union, paragraph 4(h).
38. A/59/PV.5, 22 September 2004.
39. A/60/L.1, 15 September 2005, paragraph 138.
40. A/60/L.1, 15 September 2005, paragraph 139.
41. See, for example, United Nations General Assembly, Fulfilling our collective responsibil-
ity: international assistance and the responsibility to protect: report of the Secretary-General,
A/68/947–S/2014/449 (11 July 2014), available from undocs.org/A/68/947.
42. Correspondence with the authors, 9 June 2016.
43. Correspondence with the authors, 10 June 2016.

44. A vital and enduring commitment: implementing the responsibility to protect, Report of the
Secretary-General, A/69/981 (13 July 2015).
45. ACHPR/Res.117 (XXXXII) 07: Resolution on Strengthening the Responsibility to Protect in
Africa; and A7-0130/2013, European Parliament recommendation to the Council on the UN
principle of the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (‘R2P’).
46. See www.un.org/News/dh/infocus/Sri_Lanka/POE_Report_Full.pdf and http://www.un.org/
News/dh/infocus/Sri_Lanka/The_Internal_Review_Panel_report_on_Sri_Lanka.pdf; see also
Chesterman, Simon, Ian Johnstone and David M. Malone, The Law and Practice of the UN,
2nd ed (Oxford; New York, 2016), pp. 94–109; 592–8.
47. See Ramesh Thakur, ‘West Shouldn’t Fault Sri Lankan Government Tactics’, Daily Yomiuri,
12 June 2009.
48. See Cristina G. Badescu and Thomas G. Weiss, ‘Misrepresenting R2P and Advancing Norms:
An Alternative Spiral?’ International Studies Perspective 11(4), 2010, pp. 354–74.
49. Jennifer M. Welsh, ‘The “Narrow But Deep Approach” to Implementing the Responsibility
to Protect’, in Sheri Rosenberg, Tibi Galis, and Alex Zucker (eds) Reconstructing Atrocity
Prevention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 81–94.
50. These references are not as comprehensive or precise as those contained in SCR 1674. For
example, in resolution 1973, in a preambular paragraph, the Council reiterates ‘the responsi-
bility of the Libyan authorities top protect the Libyan population’, not mentioning explicitly
international responsibilities to protect when states fail to do so (enshrined in paragraph 139).
Proponents of R2P see no problem here, as they view all elements of paragraphs 138 and 139
as linked indissociably. But others might beg to differ.
51. SCR 1975 of 2011, imposing sanctions on individuals associated with the regime, recalls the
UN’s peacekeeping mission in the country, UNOCI, having as part of its mission ‘its mandate
to protect civilians under imminent threat of physical violence’.
52. On whether the Libya intervention can properly be described as driven by R2P, see the nega-
tive assessments of A. Hehir, ‘The Permanence of Inconsistency: Libya, the Security Council
and the Responsibility to Protect’, International Security 318(1), 2013, pp. 137–159; and
J. Morris, ‘Libya and Syria: R2P and the spectre of the swinging pendulum’, International
Affairs 89(5), 2013, pp. 1265–83.
53. President Obama recently expressed his view that the Libya intervention ‘didn’t work’ and
reservations over the approach of several North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies in
Libya which seemed to revel in the military prowess involved, notably France and the United
Kingdom, but then were nowhere to be found as the country descended into internal political
chaos and widespread violence as of 2012. See Jeffrey Goldberg, ‘The Obama Doctrine’, The
Atlantic, April 2016, available at: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/04/the-
obama-doctrine/471525/. A thoughtful volume on the reconstitution of states after massive
rights violations is Béatrice Pouligny, Simon Chesterman and Albrecht Schnabel, After Mass
Crime: Rebuilding States and Communities (Tokyo, Japan: United Nations University Press,
2007).
54. For Brazil’s Concept Note, see UN document A/66/551-S/2011/701 of 11 November 2011.
55. Ramesh Thakur, ‘Humanitarian Intervention’, in Thomas G. Weiss and Sam Daws (eds) The
Oxford Handbook of the United Nations (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007),
p. 387.
56. Philipp Rotmann, Gerrit Kurtz, and Sarah Brockmeier, ‘Major Powers and the Contested
Evolution of a Responsibility to Protect’, Conflict, Security & Development 14(4), 2014,
pp. 355–74. See also Alex Bellamy, ‘Responsibility to Protect Turns Ten’, Ethics and
International Affairs, 29(2), 2015, pp. 161–85.
57. Correspondence with the authors, 27 May 2016.

58. An excellent chapter on ‘hard choices’ relating to international intervention is provided

in Michael W. Doyle, ‘Ways of War and Peace’ (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), pp.
389–420.
Author biographies
Charles Cater is an expert on the United Nations Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea.
Previously, he was a Research Analyst at Security Council Report and an adjunct professor at
Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.
David M Malone is rector of the United Nations University and an Under-Secretary-General of the
United Nations. Earlier, he oversaw multilateral and economic diplomacy within Canada’s Foreign
and Trade Ministry for a time. He has authored or edited 14 books, often with friends, of which the
most recent is The Law and Practice of the UN, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2016).

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Annan’s role in driving the development of R2P

Multi-tiered international debate leads to UN endorsement

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ICISS owed an intellectual debt to earlier work on internally displaced persons of

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Paragraph 138 also suggests the ‘international community should, as appropriate,

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This strikes us as precisely right.

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He is currently serving a term of 50 years in a UK prison.

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58. An excellent chapter on ‘hard choices’ relating to international intervention is provided

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