Paper details
| Paper authors | Stefan Bakumenko, Mike Brand |
| In panel on | Protecting civilians in a changing world order |
| Paper presenter(s) will be presenting |
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Abstract
At the 2005 World Summit, heads of state unanimously adopted an Outcome Document laying out states’ responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The principle of a timely and decisive international response in situations where states are manifestly failing this obligation was a watershed moment for prevention, protection, and accountability. It challenged the hegemony of state sovereignty and gave hope to global populations facing war and atrocity crimes. Twenty years later, R2P lies in tatters. Vicious wars, atrocity crimes, and genocide have come and gone without the promised timely and decisive action. Gridlock at the UN Security Council, global rearmament, specific states’ assaults on international law, inadequate investment in prevention frameworks, and the politicization of R2P have significantly undermined public faith in collective protection.
This paper asks whether R2P remains relevant and feasible today. To answer this question, it explores the role that R2P could have played within global legal and normative frameworks and the incentives, ideologies, and interventions that critically undermined R2P. It situates the politicized R2P intervention in Libya within a changing world order of transnational profit, power, and violence. The paper connects these trends to the subsequent failure to intervene in Syria and Myanmar and again in Sudan and Gaza. It concludes by presenting a few tactics, largely led by communities in conflict themselves, that offer pillars upon which to rebuild R2P and provide a strategy countering the lawless new order. Namely, mutual aid, economic power, and community-driven justice offer compelling options for circumventing states’ stranglehold on protecting civilians in conflict.
