The Responsibility to Protect: A Defense
Alex J. Bellamy
Abstract
As recent events in Syria, Darfur and elsewhere show only too well, genocide and mass atrocities is a recurrent problem in world affairs. Despite repeated pleas of ‘never again’, the international community has struggled to find a meaningful way of preventing these crimes and protecting vulnerable populations. A breakthrough was reached in 2005, however, when world leaders agreed the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) principle and promised to protect their own populations from these crimes and step in to offer protection to populations when their own state fails to do so. Since then, progress ... More
As recent events in Syria, Darfur and elsewhere show only too well, genocide and mass atrocities is a recurrent problem in world affairs. Despite repeated pleas of ‘never again’, the international community has struggled to find a meaningful way of preventing these crimes and protecting vulnerable populations. A breakthrough was reached in 2005, however, when world leaders agreed the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) principle and promised to protect their own populations from these crimes and step in to offer protection to populations when their own state fails to do so. Since then, progress has been made to translate the high sounding language of R2P into a new practical politics of protection. This book argues that although it is far from perfect, R2P offers the best chance in our own time to build an international community that is less tolerant of mass atrocities and more predisposed to preventing them. It shows that progress has been made to implement R2P but important challenges remain. There is no silver bullet to the problem of genocide and mass atrocities and R2P does not purport to provide one. Instead, it offers a set of shared expectations about appropriate behavior that may make the world less tolerant of mass atrocities and more protective of its victims.
Keywords:
Genocide,
mass atrocities,
protection,
United Nations,
responsibility to protect
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2014 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780198704119 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2014 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198704119.001.0001 |
