Abstract
Arguably, in the last fourteen years, we have witnessed the ‘rise’ and ‘fall’ of an international norm called the Responsibility to Protect (R2P, also abbreviated as RtoP). When the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) introduced the ‘responsibility to protect’ to the international community in 2001, it followed the motto ‘never again’. In this vein, R2P prescribed states and the international community with three responsibilities—to prevent, to react, and to rebuild—enabling them to prevent or halt mass atrocities against populations.
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Notes
- 1.
The slogan of ‘never again’ was first used in the aftermath of the Nuremberg Tribunals as a pledge not to experience the horrors of the Second World War again. Later, in the 1990s, such a call was reiterated upon the failure to prevent the Rwandan Genocide.
- 2.
For reasons of brevity, hereinafter, I will refer to humanitarian military interventions as humanitarian interventions.
- 3.
In tracing R2P’s progress, a minor but theoretical contribution is achieved first by revisiting Finnemore and Sikkink’s norm life-cycle scheme through introducing venue and negotiation as additional influences, and second by analysing the content and language of the UN Secretary-General ’s reports.
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Gözen Ercan, P. (2016). Introduction. In: Debating the Future of the ‘Responsibility to Protect’. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52427-0_1
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