Foreword

Those of us involved in the creation of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) concept were trying neither to create new international legal rules nor undermine old ones. Our intended contribution was not to International Relations theory but political practice. We knew that in the real world it was going to be hard to get perfect results, but we wanted to change the way that the world’s policymakers, and those who influence them, thought and above all acted in response to emerging, imminent, and actually occurring mass atrocity crimes behind sovereign state walls. The bottom line was to change the habits of centuries by generating a reflex international response, not only in words but also in deeds, that genocide, other crimes against humanity, and major war crimes were everybody’s business, not nobody’s.

Part of the purpose of the articles in this Special Issue, and the Indiana University conference from which they grew, was to take stock of how far these aspirations have been met in the years since R2P was formally, and unanimously, embraced by the United Nations General Assembly in 2005. More particularly, it is to assess how well, if at all, the major countries of the global South – led by the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) – have come to terms with the new standards of behavior enshrined in the concept.

Looking at the catastrophic series of events in Syria, where R2P has gained no traction at all, largely because of negative BRICS reaction to the initially successful but then divisive and ultimately failed military intervention in Libya in 2011, it would be easy to say that nothing has changed for the better. And some of these voices are to be heard in the articles assembled here. But using as my benchmarks the four big things that R2P was designed to be – a normative force, a catalyst for institutional change, and a framework for both prevention and effective reaction – my own assessment is more positive, albeit not remotely complacent.

Normatively, R2P has achieved a global take-up unimaginable for the earlier concept of ‘humanitarian intervention’ which R2P has now rightly, and almost completely, displaced (a certain lingering US academic nostalgia for that language notwithstanding). True, many states are still clearly more comfortable with the first two pillars of R2P (the responsibility of all states to protect their own peoples and that of others to assist them) than they are with the third (the world’s responsibility to react effectively, by measures extending from persuasion to coercion, when that protection fails). But there is no longer any serious dissent evident in relation to any of the elements of the 2005 Resolution.

The best evidence lies in the General Assembly’s annual interactive debates since 2009, which have shown ever stronger and more clearly articulated support for what is now widely accepted as a new political (if not legal) norm, and in the more than 40 resolutions referencing R2P that have now been passed by the Security Council (35 of them after the divisions over Libya in 2011).

Institutionally, more than 50 states and intergovernmental organizations have now established R2P ‘focal points’ – designated high-level officials whose job is to analyze atrocity risk and mobilize appropriate responses. Civilian response capability is receiving much more organized attention, as is the need for militaries to rethink their force configuration, doctrine, rules of engagement, and training to deal better with mass atrocity response operations.

Preventively, R2P-driven strategies have had a number of notable successes, notably in stopping the recurrence of strife in Kenya after 2008; in the West African cases of Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea, and Cote d’Ivoire over the last decade; and Kyrgyzstan after 2010. Volatile situations such as Burundi get the kind of continuing Security Council attention unknown to Rwanda in the 1990s. Strong civilian protection mandates are now the norm in peacekeeping operations. And the whole preventive toolbox, long and short term, structural and operational, is much better understood, albeit with action still often lagging behind rhetoric.

Reactively, however, where it matters most that R2P make a difference, the record has been at best mixed. On the positive side are the success stories in Kenya in 2008, Côte d’Ivoire in 2011, and at least initially in Libya in 2011, and the partial success that can be claimed for UN operations in Congo, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic. But against this must be weighed serious failures in Sri Lanka and Sudan, in stopping atrocities by nonstate actors such as Boko Haram in territory they control, and above all in halting the carnage in Syria.

Reestablishing Security Council consensus in these hardest of cases is not impossible, but it will take time. Brazil’s ‘responsibility while protecting’ (RWP) proposal remains the most constructive of all the suggested ways forward, requiring as it would all Council members to debate more comprehensively the criteria that need to be met before any use of force is authorized and to accept close monitoring and review of any coercive military mandate throughout its lifetime. The other BRICS countries – even Russia, although less so in the last 2 years – have all shown genuine interest in this approach as a way out of the paralysis which has afflicted decision making since the disagreement over Libya. Much will depend on the willingness of the US, UK, and France to recognize how much damage was done by their perceived arrogance toward the BRICS in 2011, when without further consultation they stretched a limited civilian protection mandate into an open-ended regime change one, and their willingness to accept some modest confidence-building new procedures of the kind Brazil has proposed.

Achieving fundamental change in the way states and their leaders think and behave is as hard as international relations gets. By any historical standard, the speed and extent of the evolution of R2P, in the 15 years since the idea was conceived, has been remarkable. And my own strong instinct is that no policymakers anywhere in the world really want to see a return to the bad old days of Cambodia, Rwanda, and the Balkans. But achieving the complete implementation of R2P in all its necessary dimensions – the effective prevention of the occurrence, continuation and recurrence of mass atrocity crimes – is still manifestly work in progress.

The advancement and ultimate completion of that work will require sustained further commitment by key players at a number of different levels. The top-down political commitment of government policymakers across the world is obviously crucial. But so too is sustained advocacy from civil society organizations, directly and through the media, to create the kind of bottom-up pressure that political leaders, whatever their governing system, find difficult to ignore.

And what always matters, in the process of norm initiation, consolidation and application – even if this is sometimes undervalued by practitioners – is whether the idea in question has strong intellectual underpinnings and stands up to rigorous analytical scrutiny. Well researched, thoughtful, and credible academic analysis of the kind on display in the articles here assembled – asking the right questions if not always offering conclusive or universally accepted answers – will continue to be a major input into the international policy-making process. And there is no international policy issue touching more fundamentally on our common humanity than how we are to avoid in future the failures in responding to mass atrocity crimes which have so often seared our consciences in the past.