Review Essay: Transforming R2P from Rhetoric to Reality

Adopted in September 2005 by the UN General Assembly as part of the UN World Summit's Outcome Document, the "Responsibility to Protect" (R2P) principle has gained demonstrable traction during the first decade of the new millennium. It was first used and defined as the title for the 2001 report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS). R2P was also featured in the report of the UN Secretary-General's High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change, entitled A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility (2004). Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan also embraced R2P in his own report, In Larger Freedom: Toward Development, Security and Human Rights for All (2005), and in 2006 the UN Security Council reaffirmed R2P in Resolution 1674.

The international community's widespread recognition of Responsibility to Protect poses serious practical challenges to state makers holding the view that sovereignty is, or at least ought to be, inviolable. At the same time, R2P also poses theoretical and conceptual challenges to those practitioners of disciplinary international relations trying to analyze and make sense of the contemporary world affairs unfolding around them. The source of these challenges lie in three interrelated presumptions underpinning R2P: first, that the state bears primary responsibility for protecting its own population from mass crime and conscience-shocking atrocity; second, that the international community is responsible for assisting states to meet these duties; and third, that UN member states are also responsible for protecting at-risk populations when the host state fails to provide the necessary protection. In addition to recognizing the international community's responsibility to react to atrocity crimes—which include, genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity—R2P recognizes the international community's responsibility to help prevent those atrocities from occurring in the first place as well as its responsibility to help rebuild governments, economies, and societies in the aftermath of mass crime. The logic of R2P therefore represents a radical departure from the highly controversial muscular humanitarian interventions of the 1990s.

This review briefly examines three recent works, each of which responds to the practical, conceptual, and theoretical challenges posed by the emergence of R2P.

While the authors of these works rely upon various approaches to deal with their topic, a consensus emerges around the need to complete the transformation of R2P from words into deeds, from concept into norm, from rhetoric into reality.

Gareth Evans' The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and for All (2008) provides an insider's account of the emergence of the R2P concept. He is well known internationally for his former role as Australian foreign minister, and for his current post as president and chief executive officer of the International Crisis Group (ICG). Evans played an integral part in developing and articulating the R2P concept, not only as co-chair of the International Convention on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) and as a member of the UN High-Level Panel but also, and more recently, as co-chair of the International Advisory Board for the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, launched in early 2008. Indeed, Evans was so central to the development of this concept that the phrase he coined—the "Responsibility to Protect"—provided the title for the ICISS report, although the catchy acronym "R2P" was someone else's suggestion. Building on his personal involvement, the central purpose of Evans' latest book is to introduce, elaborate, and clarify the R2P concept for his readers, and to rectify some of the prevalent misunderstandings that accompany this concept which misinform much of the relevant discussion occurring within the academy, the media...