Chapter One
R2P as Principle and Policy

The responsibility to protect (R2P) is a normative response to a particular set of challenges to public policy. It did not emerge from nowhere, as its roots can be traced to decades of failure to anticipate, prevent, and curb atrocity crimes. These failures had consequences not only for the tens of millions of people who had lost their lives, their dignity, or their loved ones to such crimes, but also for the viability and character of their societies and for the legitimacy of international law and institutions. These episodes of mass killing, forced displacement, and sexual and gender-based violence had left deep and lasting scars on the human condition. The repeated inability or unwillingness to develop principles, strategies, policies, instruments, and practices for effective prevention and protection had raised troubling doubts about public policy priorities and about the efficacy of institutions on many levels. So this book begins with a brief look at the seminal events and conceptual innovations of the 1990s that both shaped the etiology and evolution of R2P and laid the political foundation for its development as a core principle of and standard for public policy.

The first four sections of this chapter address critical elements of the 1990s' experience that led to the birth of R2P: (1) the human security paradigm; (2) the focus on vulnerable populations; (3) normative, institutional, and operational developments in Africa; and (4) lessons from the searing atrocities in Rwanda and Srebrenica. These developments both propelled and shaped the effort to develop more effective responses to the challenges to public policy presented by atrocity crimes. The final three sections of the chapter assess the main elements of the three successive conceptions of R2P that emerged in 2001, 2005, and 2009 respectively, as the principle moved closer to implementation. The fifth section considers the mandate, assumptions, and conclusions of the pathbreaking 2001 report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) that coined the term "responsibility to protect." In the sixth section, the three paragraphs of the Outcome Document of the 2005 World Summit that were devoted to R2P are compared and contrasted to the initial conception of R2P presented by the ICISS report four years earlier. The seventh and final section explains how the 2009 implementation report by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon strove to translate the agreed language of the 2005 Outcome Document into a comprehensive and sustainable strategy for moving from promise to practice.

In relating the 2001, 2005, and 2009 versions of R2P, the chapter addresses how and why the following five fundamental questions were handled somewhat differently at each juncture:

• What is the problem that R2P is meant to address?
• Who is responsible for addressing it?
• What tools could be both effective and appropriate for addressing it?
• Who should be authorized to wield those tools in various circumstances?
• How should the articulation and application of the R2P principle be conditioned by other widely accepted norms and principles?

Understandings about what R2P is and is meant to accomplish changed in substantial ways over those eight years. On the operational side, R2P was refined through a combination of political exigencies and practical experience. On the normative side, R2P's metamorphosis from a concept to a principle to an emerging norm proceeded with unusual alacrity. As explained in chapter 2, there are compelling reasons to conclude that R2P has developed since 2009 into a norm (or standard of behavior), as the term is defined in the social sciences.1 By focusing on how rapid and far-reaching the evolution of R2P was over those years, chapter 1 also sheds light on why the concept so often has been subject to manipulation or misunderstanding despite (or sometimes because of) all of the attention it has garnered in scholarly and intergovernmental debate. This chapter also concludes, more hopefully, that R2P has reached a stage of conceptual and normative maturity, so that its implementation in policy and practice - the focus of this volume - can proceed as conditions permit.

The Promise of the 1990s: Human Security

The decade of the 1990s opened with high expectations. The conclusion of the four-decades-long Cold War appeared to offer unprecedented opportunities for forging international consensus, including in the UN Security Council, for easing tensions and identifying common ground for resolving a number of long-running conflicts and for strengthening international law and institutions. In September 1991, UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar welcomed the "renaissance of the Organization," as "the extinction of the bipolarity associated with the cold war has no doubt removed the factor that virtually immobilized international relations over four decades."2 When the Soviet representative - the USSR had not yet imploded - voted for Security Council Resolution 678 (1990) of November 29, 1990 to authorize the member states "to use all necessary means to uphold and implement" its earlier resolutions aimed at reversing the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, it was the first time that the coercive use of force under Chapter VII of the Charter had been authorized in a vote that included all members of the Council.

Indeed, the number of vetoes cast in the Council dropped dramatically during the first half of the 1990s, while the number of enforcement resolutions passed under Chapter VII soared.3 Meeting for the first time at the heads-of-state level in January 1992, the Council asked the new Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali of Egypt, to prepare a report on a range of peace and security challenges.4 Though stemming mass atrocity crimes was not among the issues to be considered, the Secretary-General's subsequent report, An Agenda for Peace: Preventive Diplomacy, Peacemaking, and Peacekeeping, did flag the importance of humanitarian assistance for preventing conflicts.5 More consequently, he acknowledged that "the time of absolute and exclusive sovereignty?.?.?.?has passed; its theory was never matched by reality."6

The end of the Cold War permitted capitals and international institutions to shift some attention from more globally existential issues, such as nuclear annihilation, to more immediate threats to individuals, communities, and societies. A range of scholars, experts, and commentators called for raising the political profile of human security concerns alongside more traditional concerns about the security of states and borders. At the United Nations, the concept of human security was introduced in the 1994 Human Development Report. As it commented, "The concept of security has for too long been interpreted narrowly: as security of territory from external aggression, or as protection of national interests in foreign policy or as global security from the threat of nuclear holocaust. It has been related more to nation-states than to people."7 The following year, the independent Commission on Global Governance took this notion a bit further, linking it more specifically to sovereignty and atrocity crimes committed by governments:

In many countries the security of people has been violated on a horrendous scale without any external aggression or external threat to territorial integrity or state sovereignty. To confine the concept of security exclusively to the protection of states is to ignore the interests of people who form the citizens of a state and in whose name sovereignty is exercised. It can produce situations in which regimes in power feel they have the unfettered freedom to abuse the right to security of their people.8

The Commission urged that the Security Council be granted the authority to defend people within borders and asserted that "all people, no less than all states, have a right to a secure existence, and all states have an obligation to protect those rights."9 In 1999, the Canadian Foreign Minister, Lloyd Axworthy, told the Security Council that "the promotion of human security is the bedrock upon which all other objectives of the United Nations Charter must rest."10

During the early 1990s, there was a growing awareness across the international community that the apparent growth in the number and complexity of intrastate conflicts was presenting a particularly difficult set of peace and security challenges. As the 1994 Human Development Report put it, "with the dark shadows of the cold war receding, one can now see that many conflicts are within nations rather than between nations."11 As that report noted, "Of the 82 armed conflicts between 1989 and 1992, only three were between states."12 According to a 1996 report to the General Assembly, prepared by Graça Machel, on the impact of armed conflict on children, all 30 major conflicts in 1995 "took place within States, between factions split along ethnic, religious or cultural lines."13 Over time, a number of commentators came to recognize that even civil conflicts could have significant international dimensions.14 Often they...