The Development and Evolution of R2P as International Policy
| Published date | 01 September 2015 |
| Date | 01 September 2015 |
| Author | Ramesh Thakur |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12258 |
The Development and Evolution of R2P as
International Policy
Ramesh Thakur
Australian National University
Abstract
This article traces the arc of global public policy development by using the responsibility to protect (R2P) as a case
study and the central role and place of the United Nations in that story. The arc has seven way-stations: policy setting
(nonintervention as the entrenched norm of the postcolonial order despite an increasingly internationalised human
conscience among many western peoples and governments and the episodic practice of humanitarian intervention);
policy challenge (the need to respond to mass atrocity crimes against the unacceptability both of inaction and unilat-
eral intervention); policy innovation (R2P); policy development (an iterative process since 2005 engaging multiple
actors); policy implementation (in Libya in 2011); policy paralysis (in Syria since 2011); and the emerging policy parame-
ters (how to ensure interventions are done with due responsibility).
Policy Implications
•For a new global norm like R2P to regulate international behaviour, it must first be translated into national and
international policy.
•Shared values can be formulated as a global norm at the United Nations as a key site of global governance, but
national policy must accommodate key interests also, especially of the major actors.
•The future evolution of R2P as an organising principle of international behaviour will be shaped by a mutually
respectful conversation between the leading powers from the global North and South.
•This requires providing space to the emerging powers for writing the rules and designing and controlling the insti-
tutions of global governance.
•It also requires the emerging powers to accept the growing burdens of global leadership commensurate with their
rising profiles.
This fall marks the tenth anniversary of the unanimous
adoption of the responsibility to protect (R2P) by world
leaders gathered at a United Nations (UN) summit in
New York as the organising principle for responding to
mass atrocity crimes of genocide, crimes against human-
ity, war crimes and ethnic cleansing. R2P has become
the normative instrument of choice for converting a
shocked international conscience into decisive collective
action –for channelling selective moral indignation into
collective policy remedies –to prevent and stop atroci-
ties. In the vacuum of responsibility for the safety of the
marginalised, stigmatised and dehumanised out-group
subject to mass atrocities, R2P provides an entry point
for the international community to step in and take up
the moral and military slack. Pared down to its essence,
R2P is the acceptance of a duty of care by all those who
live in zones of safety towards those trapped in zones of
danger. It strikes a balance between unilateral interfer-
ence rooted in the arrogance of power and institutiona-
lised indifference that dislocates the ‘other’from the
‘self’. The British historian Sir Martin Gilbert (2007) has
described R2P as ‘the most significant adjustment to
national sovereignty in 360 years’.
According to Australian international law professor
Anne Orford (2011, p. 41), R2P ‘represents one of the
most significant normative shifts in international relations
since the creation of the UN in 1945’. Thakur, a commis-
sioner and co-author of its report (Evans and Thakur,
2013, p. 199) and Weiss, the research director of the
International Commission on Intervention and State Sov-
ereignty (ICISS) have claimed that ‘no idea has moved
faster in the international normative arena than the
“responsibility to protect”’ (Thakur and Weiss, 2009, p.
23). In terms of its current status, R2P has an institutional
home within the UN in the form of a Joint Office that
includes the special advisers on genocide prevention
(Adama Dieng) and R2P (Jennifer Welsh). It has been
institutionalised in multiple government and regional
©2015 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Global Policy (2015) 6:3 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12258
Global Policy Volume 6 . Issue 3 . September 2015
190
Research Article
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