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Beyond Words

U.S. Policy and the Responsibility to Protect

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Responsibility to Protect

Abstract

The U.S. position on preventing mass atrocities and on the “responsibility to protect (R2P)” has developed over the course of nearly fifteen years. As a matter of policy, the United States has begun to articulate a policy and doctrine that supports a greater international role in preventing and stopping mass atrocities. As a practical matter, however, U.S. efforts have been sporadic. Concerns about how changing notions of sovereignty and international obligations affect U.S. freedom of action have remained a constant throughout the Democratic and Republican administrations of the past fifteen years. Surprisingly, formal support for an active U.S. role in preventing mass atrocities has weathered steadily declining public support for the war in Iraq. To understand the development of the U.S. position on the responsibility to protect, it is useful to go back to U.S. policy toward the genocides and mass atrocities in the years immediately following the end of the cold war, when the United States repeatedly grappled with the question of humanitarian intervention. Washington’s response to crises in Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, and Kosovo shaped its response to the concept of the responsibility to protect years later.

Lee Feinstein is visiting fellow in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution, and Erica De Bruin is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

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Notes

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Authors
  1. Lee Feinstein
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  2. Erica De Bruin
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Editor information

Richard H. Cooper Juliette Voïnov Kohler

Copyright information

© 2009 Richard H. Cooper and Juliette Voïnov Kohler

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Feinstein, L., Bruin, E.D. (2009). Beyond Words. In: Cooper, R.H., Kohler, J.V. (eds) Responsibility to Protect. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230618404_12

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