This book relates the Responsibility to Protect to existing bodies of theory on the nature and foundations of political and international order.

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.

This volume is a collection of some of the key essays by Ramesh Thakur on the origins, implementation and future prospects of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) norm. The book offers a comprehensive yet accessible review of the origins, evolution, advances and shortcomings of the R2P principle. A literature review is followed by an overview of the background, meaning and development of R2P. With a focus on the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), Part I analyses the features of, and explains the factors that make for success and failure of commission diplomacy. Part II discusses the controversies surrounding efforts to implement R2P, including the role and importance of emerging powers. Part III describes the remaining protection gaps and explains why R2P will remain relevant because it is essentially demand driven. Finally, the book concludes with a look back at the origins of R2P and looks ahead to possible future directions. This book will be essential for students of the Responsibility to Protect, and of much interest to students of global governance, human rights, international law and international relations.

This edited volume critically examines the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) as a guiding norm in international politics. After NATO’s intervention in Libya, against the backdrop of civil wars in Syria and Yemen, and because of the cynical support for R2P by states such as Saudi Arabia, this norm is the subject of heavy criticism. It seems that the R2P is just political rhetoric, an instrument exploited by the powerful states. Hence, the R2P is being challenged. At the same time, however, institutional settings, normative discourses and contestation practices are making it more robust. New understandings of responsibility and the politics of protection are creating new normative spaces, patterns of legitimacy, and norm entrepreneurs, thereby reinforcing the R2P. This book’s goals are to discuss the R2P’s roots, institutional framework, and evolution; to reveal its shortcomings and pitfalls; and to explore how it is exploited by certain states. Further, it elaborates on the R2P’s strength as a norm. Accordingly, the contributions presented here discuss various ways in which the R2P is being challenged or confirmed, or both at once. As the authors demonstrate, these developments concern not only diplomatic communication and political practices within international institutions, but also to normative discourses. Furthermore, the book includes chapters that reevaluate the R2P from a normative standpoint, e.g. by proposing cosmopolitan standards as a guide for states’ external behavior. Other contributors reassess the historical evidence from U.N. negotiations on the R2P principle, and the productive or restrictive role of institutions. Discussing new issues relating to the R2P such as global and regional power shifts or foreign policy, as well as the phenomenon of authoritarian interventionism under the R2P umbrella, this book will appeal to all IR scholars and students interested in humanitarianism, norms, and power. By analyzing the status quo of the R2P, it enriches and broadens the debate on what the R2P currently is, and what it ought to be.

This book revisits and interrogates the evolution of the Responsibility to Protect in search of the root cause of R2P’s failure to date. Employing a critical constructivist lens throughout, the book locates the origin of that apparent failure in the close association of R2P with humanitarian intervention. In returning to the ideational underpinnings and broader ambitions of R2P’s architects, the analysis reveals that reducing R2P to little more than a “solution” to the long-standing problem(s) confronting humanitarian intervention betrayed its fundamental purpose: advancing a new norm of, and for, human security provision. Employing a modified version of the norm life-cycle model as a diagnostic tool, the author uncovers the underlying dynamics of R2P’s normative stagnation over the past two decades. The book concludes with a prescriptive remedy in the form of a two-part blueprint for reconstructing and reanimating R2P’s normative agenda for an international society confronted by mounting and existential threats to humanity. This book will be of much interest to scholars and students of the Responsibility to Protect, human rights, security studies, and international relations in general.

This Open Syllabus on the Responsibility to Protect R2P is developed by the Centre for Research in Air and Space Law at Maharashtra National Law University Mumbai. Over the past several years, R2P has emerged as a critical point of discussion in international discourse about how to best ensure the protection of populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. Despite the importance of this R2P as a global politico-legal doctrine, the concept of R2P is hardly reflected in the curriculum of international law courses in Indian law schools. Understanding the future directions of R2P in a changing world becomes important to study the system and institutions of international law. The study of ethics and politics of R2P also becomes important for researchers and students from the Global South to evaluate third-world ideas and approaches to the responses of global institutions to crises. The purpose of this open syllabus is to help Indian law schools to engage in research, training and teaching about the Responsibility to Protect. The open syllabus seeks to develop an in-depth understanding of the R2P concept and encourages learners to critically examine the ethics, law, and politics of R2P. This project is developed as a framework that can be adopted by law schools as a credit course. The contents of this course can also be incorporated into the existing international law courses in law schools. All chapters are tailored so that the readers get a holistic knowledge of the discourse of R2P.

In Responsibility to Protect and Women, Peace and Security: Aligning the Protection Agendas, editors Sara E. Davies, Zim Nwokora, Eli Stamnes and Sarah Teitt address the intersections of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle and the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda. Contributions from policy-makers and academics consider both the merits and the utility of aligning the protection agendas of R2P and WPS. A number of actionable recommendations are made concerning a unification of the agendas to best support the global empowerment of women and the prevention of mass atrocities.

Understanding the global security environment and delivering the necessary governance responses is a central challenge of the 21st century. On a global scale, the central regulatory tool for such responses is public international law. But what is the state, role, and relevance of public international law in today's complex and highly dynamic global security environment? Which concepts of security are anchored in international law? How is the global security environment shaping international law, and how is international law in turn influencing other normative frameworks? The Oxford Handbook of the International Law of Global Security provides a ground-breaking overview of the relationship between international law and global security. It constitutes a comprehensive and systematic mapping of the various sub-fields of international law dealing with global security challenges, and offers authoritative guidance on key trends and debates around the relationship between public international law and global security governance. This Handbook highlights the central role of public international law in an effective global security architecture and, in doing so, addresses some of the most pressing legal and policy challenges of our time. The Handbook features original contributions by leading scholars and practitioners from a wide range of professional and disciplinary backgrounds, reflecting the fluidity of the concept of global security and the diversity of scholarship in this area.

This book focuses on measures pertaining to the three-pillar implementation strategy of R2P and examines how and to what extent the three pillars have been practised. Rich in its geographical scope, this edited book provides a critical analysis of R2P practice over the last two decades by focusing on representative cases from different regions. Analysing not only recent and/or underexplored cases but also widely studied cases from a fresh and alternative perspective, it sheds light on the depth and scope of the norm as well as the variety of actors involved and how they impact R2P practice. Diverging from most accounts, this edited book does not approach the cases as a ‘success’ or ‘failure’ of R2P. By studying the background to the conflicts and making assessments on a pillar-by-pillar basis, each chapter addresses the root causes, traces the process of implementation, investigates the actions of the actors involved, identifies elements of success and failure and finally questions the sustainability of the protection provided to date. Meanwhile, the conceptual chapters complement the case analyses through an overall evaluation of R2P’s first two decades and the progress achieved so far with the aim to draw lessons for future implementations of R2P.

This book contributes to current debates on the protection of human rights in the 21st century. With the global economic collapse, the rise of the BRICS, the post-intervention chaos in Libya, the migration crisis in Europe, and the regional conflagration sparked by the conflict in Syria, the need to protect human rights has arguably never been greater. In light of the precipitous decline in global respect for human rights and the eruption or escalation of intra-state crises across the world, this book asks 'what is the future of human rights protection?'. Seeking to avoid both denial and fatalism, this book thus aims to: examine the principles at the very foundation of the debate on human rights; diagnose the causes of the decline of liberal internationalism so as to offer guiding lessons for future initiatives; identify those practices and developments that can, and should, be preserved in the new era; question the parameters of the contemporary debate and advance perspectives that aim to identify the contours of future ideas and practices that may offer a way forward. This book will be of much interest to students of humanitarian intervention, R2P, international organisations, human rights and security studies.